When you work for a company that has 100,000 employees and serves billions of consumers, it's easy to fall for the illusion that the workers and the customers actually matter. The reality: the only people who matter are the shareholders. The board of directors who run your company answer to them, not to the employees or even to the CEO.These days, self-styled "activist investors" are making this even more extreme by forcing even well-intentioned companies to prioritise short-term share-price increases of long-term viability and employee retention. They they take their money and run. The sad thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. We let it be this way because the people who make our laws (in the US, in Europe, in Asia) tend to be from the share-owner class, rather than from the 99.9% of people who are just workers and customers. So they like the current system where it's perfectly fine for a company still making huge profits to fire 10% of its workers just to add a few cents to the share-price.

When you work for a company that has 100,000 employees and serves billions of consumers, it's easy to fall for the illusion that the workers and the customers actually matter. The reality: the only people who matter are the shareholders. The board of directors who run your company answer to them, not to the employees or even to the CEO.These days, self-styled "activist investors" are making this even more extreme by forcing even well-intentioned companies to prioritise short-term share-price increases of long-term viability and employee retention. They they take their money and run. The sad thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. We let it be this way because the people who make our laws (in the US, in Europe, in Asia) tend to be from the share-owner class, rather than from the 99.9% of people who are just workers and customers. So they like the current system where it's perfectly fine for a company still making huge profits to fire 10% of its workers just to add a few cents to the share-price.

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