For most wage earners, the corporate monoliths of our era are wielding increasing amounts of power over the average worker.

The old uniforms of white and blue collars have lost their meanings in a market with business globalization fashion trends.

Executive pay is increasingly out of hand, but this is not a recent development. What is surprising is that boards of public companies have not acted to correct this trend and it remains unchecked rocketing upwards.

The heads of America’s 500 biggest companies received an aggregate 54% pay raise last year. As a group, their total compensation amounted to $5.1 billion, versus $3.3 billion in fiscal 2003.
Scott DeCarlo – Forbes

To take in how executive compensation relates to you, you can look here for some additional resources and information. You can relate to this as a shareholder, as a employee, and/or as a consumer in the marketplace. Does a CEO that makes good business decisions really merit compensation that is more than 500 times that of the average worker? What about a CEO that is a complete failure?

PBS has a presentation from data borrowed from The Economist:

Turns out that American executive compensation rates are quite different from those of the rest of the developed world. In Japan a typical executive makes eleven times what a typical worker brings home; in Britain, 22 times.
Full story here with data from The Economist, Financial Times, The World Bank, and others.

All of this is really just a preface to my focus here which is, in addition to the top leaning compensation, we are starting to see acting outside of corporate interests is actually becoming illegal. The interests of the corporate entity are now outweighing the rights of the individual and sending that person to jail instead of just possible civil penalties. Here is an example from the recent case of International Airport Centers v. Citrin

Citrin ultimately decided to quit and go into business for himself, apparently in breach of his employment contract, according to IAC. Before returning the laptop to the companies, Citrin deleted all of the data he had collected–but he also deleted data that would have revealed improper conduct before deciding to quit, IAC claimed. He caused this deletion using a secure-erasure program making it impossible to recover the deleted information, it asserted.

IAC brought suit against Citrin, relying on the provision of the CFAA which provides that whoever “knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization to a protected computer,” violates the statute, making the remedies of the CFAA available.

Full Story by Eric J. Sinrod

They story goes on to say that the company suspected misconduct, but could not prove anything because the files were deleted. Since they suspected that these files contained evidence that and therefore the employee is a computer criminal e-terrorist for deleting his own files from his workstation.

I, for one, have deleted files from my workstation in the past. Does that mean that my former employer could prosecute me? Sounds that way. I am very likely to delete files in the future as well.