[r_smart]

Sorry, I meant it to mean that the CEO represents the interests of the employees in that the employees do well as the company does well. Yeah, they get less of the yield than those at the top, but if the company isn't doing well it puts downward pressure on all of their careers. Presumably the employees are there because they support, or are at least neutral, to the goals of the company, and thus share an interest. If they oppose the goals of the business, while I can understand why they might take a job there, I would still argue it's an ethical lapse.

[wfo]

Not the case that the employees do well as the company does well. The company does great when factories are closed and replaced with slave labor overseas. The employees, not so much. The company does great when its employees are forced to train their H1B replacements who are held hostage by their visas for no wages and then fired. The employees?

The company does great when it pays its employees the smallest amount possible, gives them the least benefits, since every cent of extraneous labor cost is, by definition, extraneous lost profit.

[r_smart]

The cheap way out for me is to say those people are no longer employees :)

Being honest though, yeah businesses will do shitty thing to employees when their interests don't align with the employees. That said, I've worked for healthy companies and sick companies, and I promise there's a world of difference there. Layoffs, outsourcing and training replacements are usually signs of sickness. The brand of medicine practiced by businesses is triage.