&gt; Your primary agreement with the company is a trade of your time and skills in return for money<p>Not really. The tradeoff is not just for money but for a spectrum of compensation, which could be equity (which could confer voting or board rights to you to monitor certain things about the company financial health), vacation time, conference attendance, foosball table access, etc.<p>Often these things are negotiable, at least if the employer values talent. So why couldn&#x27;t we negotiate that part of compensation is some sort of verifiable transparency and mutual respect in terms of monitoring the appropriateness of company activities (whether on behalf of the employer or employee)?<p>I don&#x27;t see any fundamental reason why these couldn&#x27;t be negotiated as part of an employment agreement. Instead, what I see is that most employees either don&#x27;t know or don&#x27;t care about these items, and, more importantly, that employers actively collude and engage in e.g. regulatory capture specifically to deny workers the opportunity to be able to negotiate these things.