Dont agree with what the bossman said?: "You're fired!"
And the people love it so much, they even democratically elected the poster child of that catchphrase.
That's just a bunch of random words you're saying. Reality: we're building a company so we can create wealth and support our families and achieve something. We have a plan for doing it. If you're not following the plan and just sabotaging everything, you're doing exactly that - sabotaging.
This is different than saying "hey, I don't agree, let's discuss and challenge the plat" - that's great and admirable and you should do that (and I suspect you don't actually do that in your workplace). But to silently read the strategy and then say "ah fuck'it doesn't apply to me" is a huge fuck you to your colleagues. You have chosen to accept the job and the mission, do the job.
Whose families? Most private companies state very clearly that mission is to "maximize shareholder's value". That's the whole point of being privately owned. Hiring and paying employers is a necessary evil.
That's why they need legal regulation, public supervision, even whistleblower employees.
Dictatorships are great when the leader is perfect. Problem is that they never are.
But everything else? Highly undemocratic.
Private enterprise rests on property rights. Thus Bezos, as owner, was free to write that memo, including spelling out the consequences of sabotaging the company's strategy through insubordination or incompetence.
The only way this is dictatorial is if people are coerced to work there without a legal right to quit at any time. Their employment contracts given them that right (I assume) and they spell out the consequences of quitting without giving proper notice---which one could do. Thus, they're employees, not slaves in a dictatorship.
That's not to say that Amazon or other large corporations don't have problems with mistreating workers. In fact, thinking of businesses as machine systems may encourage a mindset among management that risks dehumanizing the people who do the work. And this problem is far broader than amazon.
However, dehumanizing workers isn't inherent in private property and owners' rights to run their firms as they see fit (within the constraint of law). Look at the Guinness company - privately owned, yet a pioneer in treating workers really well, and people have tasted the quality of their work round the world. Guinness believed people have inherent dignity (as a Christian he knew they were each made in God's image), so as a business owner he knew it was good for them and for his business to treat them well.[1]
Dehumanizing employees is often a result of misaligned incentives in the legal system, of unjust laws that don't fit with reality, or more fundamentally a result of the deep levels of brokenness that exist in every human being. No one is perfect, and no human system is flawless. The distortion of private property and resulting authoritarianism in business that you ask about is a sad result of what the Bible calls sin.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Search-God-Guinness-Biography-Changed...
