One thing has stood out about America since the late twentieth century. It has been the basic sense of fairness that permeates the American character. Education, hard work, and perseverance have more often than not let to a measure of success. Not that life here has been perfect by any means, but for a time there has been an amazing effort to create fairness in everything from our educational system to our workplaces.

In what has turned out to be the best of times and the worst of times, we face another year uncertain not only of our place in the world but also of what to expect next in this exceptional experience we call America.

There are no shortages of challenges. We need to create jobs for our children and make certain Social Security is there for retirees. Yet we also have to deal with our own crumbling infrastructure while rebuilding Iraq and helping the millions made homeless by the recent tsunami. We appear to be a deeply divided country with no clearly delineated course for the future.

One thing has stood out about America since the late twentieth century. It has been the basic sense of fairness that permeates the American character. Education, hard work, and perseverance have more often than not let to a measure of success. Not that life here has been perfect by any means, but for a time there has been an amazing effort to create fairness in everything from our educational system to our workplaces.

Today we might well be witnessing the death of the basic underlying fairness has helped America to a position of power and riches never before witnessed.

Thursday in an opinion piece in the Times, Andrew Rosenthal said “the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.” He went on to say, “Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out of control.”

Having hired more than a few people with military background and having seen many of them in corporate environments, it started me thinking of the transitions that military personnel make when coming into corporate America. I can easily remember a number conversations that started out, “things are not necessarily fair in corporations.”

The military world where fairness and achievement are highly valued is very different than the American corporate world where money is the ultimate altar and your value is often determined by the people you know not how well you do your job. This was not always the case.

Now that I look back on it, it is clear that at least in my experience, there are factors at work in the corporate world that have the basic American trait of fairness in full retreat. “Doing the right thing” has been redefined as “doing the right thing for the corporation” or even worse “doing the right thing for your buddies.”

Corporations have become more like feudal empires governed mostly for the good of the few. Some corporations are now run by groups of “business associates” where decisions are made mostly based on the impact on their buddies. A promotion more often than not goes to the person who is a friend of the right person, not necessarily the most qualified person.

In theory there are laws to protect employees in corporations. In practice corporations do mostly what they want to do and employees have little real protection.

In a recent “Sally Forth” comic strip from my local paper, one of the characters wondered how to handle an improper firing. It was really a moot question since it was impossible to report an improper firing to HR since HR did the improper firing.

There are no laws to cover many of the injustices that employees in large corporations often face. Many companies have become rampant examples of favoritism and governance by people far too closely intertwined. Their impact is to make corporations a place where improper management thrives instead of being eliminated.

Once your corporate compensation moves into the world of incentive compensation, expect math unlike any you have learned. While it is true that corporations need to control costs so that they make a profit. It should also be true that people should always be treated fairly. If you are in corporation where effort and success really mirror your compensation, consider yourself very fortunate.

If anyone believes that fair compensation is the norm in corporate America, you should talk to the workers who are only supposed to work only forty hours but end up putting in hour after hour of unpaid overtime. Why do you hear so little about it? Because if the employees reported it they would lose their jobs.

Unfortunately America corporations are driven by quarterly results. Whatever makes the analysts happy is now kosher. Often that means finding clever ways to get rid of older more expensive employees or having employees work additional hours for which they receive no pay.

If you have ever tried to report a violation to a corporate human resources department, you probably know well that their first priority as one HR legal consultant once told me is “to protect the company.” Basic fairness for employees is often at odds with protecting the image or the cash horde of the corporation. Corporations have become so large that typically institutional investors only care about bottom line results not how line employees are treated.

As more and more Americans are put through these corporations, those American values that we hear so much about are often challenged. Many come out of their first corporate experience convinced that they have been treated unfairly. Some leave the corporate world in frustration. Some stay and abandon their values. Even military people, schooled for years in basic fairness, often cannot survive the temptation throwing everything to the wind for “the good of the corporation.”

This almost sounds like a situation where we should turn to our legislators for help. That challenge in itself might be another essay Of course we started out with the premise that government lawyers are getting like cynical corporate lawyers so it may well be that we stand at a precipice.

Either we reform the engine that has made America so rich or watch helplessly as bad corporations make it harder and harder for the good organizations to keep being fair to their employees while remaining competitive and profitable.