[astrange]

One kind of worker the chains are better for is the people who work at the chain. Large businesses treat their employees better because they're more professional and can eg afford an HR department.

Sole proprietorships can be okay, but employee-hiring small businesses are run by tyrants and have fewer protections against worker abuse. After all, they're only small businesses because they aren't good enough to become big businesses.

[I-M-S]

Or maybe they stay small because big business made it impossible for new businesses to grow through consolidation, regulatory capture, and other contemporary business practices that decidedly do NOT make them a better place to work (the HR department isn't there to protect the employees - it's there to protect the company from the employees).

[astrange]

Please don't reply with platitudes. If your coworker is sexually harassing you then your coworker is the person the HR department is protecting the company from. Not you. You won't make it in the middle class if you can't navigate basic politics like that.

If you have an issue with payroll I hope you don't avoid getting it fixed either, because that's HR.

[I-M-S]

I think you might be mixing up how things are supposed to work with how they work in practice. I've seen HR from the inside - while I accept that my experience was just one data point, it made me personally actively avoid workplaces that have an HR department. YMMV, of course.