That isn't so true of the bottom of the job market or places outside of high-tech. Most call centers aren't competing for anything and they treat their employees like cattle. Things like random drug testing to enforce your compliance after-hours and outside the workplace. Dress-code to enforce uniformity. Zero tolerance for dissension or disagreement with managers (e.g. Insubordination) regardless of merit. I think this is largely because they are bureaucracies and require absolute rigid compliance from its constituents in order to function.

"The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity." [0](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-bureaucracies-97e9805...)