I am (as anyone who has read my now defunct Voice of Fort Worth blog can attest) tired of corporations operating as laws unto themselves--and even (it seems) as their own police forces as well. For example, anyone who has ever walked into a store with a perfectly functional alarm system and has been asked to leave their backpack and/or other belongings at the front counter anyway is perfectly within their rights, as far as I'm concerned, never to set foot in that store again. Furthermore, we have a perfectly functional set of avenues for airing grievances in the United States whenever this kind of thing happens--either to a customer or to an employee.

My recommendations (if something like this should happen to you) are as follows:

1. Start by filing a complaint with the company/entity responsible--at the lowest level of management you can. Work your way up through higher levels of management until you are satisfied that your concerns have been addressed. (And remember, while you have a grievance, you also have the responsibility to air that grievance in a civil manner.)

2. Sometimes corporations as a whole are unwilling to cooperate with customer demands--in which case, you should leave the corporation and/or file a complaint with the appropriate government offices against the company. (If you're a customer, this would be the Better Business Bureau, as well as your local area chamber of commerce. If you're an employee, this would be the federal Department of Labor and its corresponding state organizations.)

3. Sometimes (as in the case of the present decade . . . *sigh*), normal government avenues of complaint and redress of grievances are uncooperative or unresponsive, in which case, you are within your rights to file a lawsuit against the company, begin a community-wide boycott, or unionize and strike. This was the rationale for all of those student protests in the 1960s--that other avenues had been taken and that they had proven unsuccessful.

4 . . .

There is always the press--and Al Sharpton. :)