A message conveyed by e-mail connects one to a corporation. The gain in convenience comes at a price in autonomy, perhaps not payable for decades and then only imperceptibly. In America's commercial civilization, Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, the power of government might prove a lesser threat to liberty than the excesses of freedom. If this subversion of individual liberty by economic freedom tokens the future, then the American political imagination, so long fixated on government's threat to private life, must change with the times. Government intervention to restore a balance of power between the corporation and society is rarely the model for today, when nation-states whose authority stops at their borders have neither the power nor even the jurisdiction to check globalizing corporations.
History is a poor guide to the unprecedented.
The right to collective bargaining is part of our system. Prohibitions on child and slave labor are part of our system. American capitalism has evolved to include them. You're to blame for this. Your pension fund drives corporate behavior.