James 5:1-6

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"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you." - James 5:1-6 NIV

While capitalism is better than communism and socialism/communism-lite, still in each business you have like microcosms of dictatorships in which freedom of speech for workers is denied - limited only to what the bosses and wallet-carriers/customers want to hear. That is not right. Paying people less than what they need to pay their bills and buy food is not right. Playing with their schedules every single week while pretending you need two weeks notice for having a sick day is not right. It's bad enough that nepotism and preferential treatment of relatives and friends versus "strangers" exists, but seriously why are such brats paid more money to stand around and talk while they break most rules that anyone who works and earns their pay would get fired for? It would be good if such a gap between rich and poor didn't exist, but at least pay the workers you leech off of enough to survive, stop yanking their schedules around, and let them have freedom of speech both at work and outside of work rather than stalking and punishing your workers for "thoughtcrimes" of saying things you don't like to hear since that both violates their first amendment right to free speech and you'd hate it if they did the same to you. You know what? If you do not treat people right, then may God humble you and have you live like your lowest paid workers for the rest of your lives.

There seems to be a lot of small things wrong with our culture that amount to this kind of incivility. The good news is, for everything I've read and come to understand, right now is still probably the best place and time - at least in the first world - to be alive in human history. At the same time though, as you seem to be indicating, a lot of adults are that in chronology only, the integrity most people are raised to consider an adult should have is there sparingly - sometimes yes, sometimes no, and varying significantly from company to company, department to department.

I'm starting to think that the kinds of guideposts your seeing at work (if these are your aggravations or just something drummed up from a story you heard from someone else's experience recently that brought up your own memories as such) are signs that you may be in the wrong profession. I'm switching out of accounting and going into programming - mainly because I want to be in control of how well I do at a job and I want my pass or fail to truly be my own, not a matter of (in the case of accounts payable or receivable) how well I can get people paid twice as much as me to do their job when I have no authority over them, and when I'll email the wrong things to the wrong people based on either not being told what I need to know, not being able to ask, in some cases or at some jobs learning by correction, or - in quite a few more cases - working with largely well intentioned people who are just really sloppy, procrastinate, can't teach well at all, and will forget to tell me something critical about what I'm putting together for them until the day it's due, or not assign it to me till the day it's due.

I can't always tell in what ratio what I'm looking at is just personal slack or whether it's the cognitive limitations of those around me. My best advice - on one hand be compassionate toward other people's mistakes and off-pointedness, regardless of how much you might think they dig their own holes. On the other hand - if you're in an environment where you can't make enough to live on and are getting exploited - do everything you can to figure out how you can get yourself into a better environment. You won't be able to change these people, these people may be able to change themselves but they'd need personal cataclysms to do so and I doubt you'd really want to be around to see that in motion.

Some problems here:

"Rich" is relative; a person of even lower-middle class by America's standards today would possibly be considered "wealthy" by the standard of Jesus' time, as well as much of the 3rd world.

It's also quite doubtful that Jesus was unilaterally condemning private possession of "wealth" as opposed to the vice of greed, as Job, King David, King Solomon were blessed by God and owned riches (Jesus also made a reference to King Solomon's glory in the New Testament).

Likewise assuming that Jesus was endorsing a specific form of government (e.x. socialism) by condemning greed is quite a stretch.

As is unilaterally equating "capitalism" with greed; the capitalism of Adam Smith for example would be quite different from "corporatism" which is sometimes all painted under the broad brush of "capitalism". Likewise the 10 Commandments seemed to affirm the notion of property rights.

James was the brother of Jesus, but even with some nearly broken luxuries a poor person is still poor when they can hardly afford their bills and still be able to eat without accepting handouts and going to food shelves.