Change - for the better, after a backlash ...

In the 1980s I worked for a manager who was a neoliberal psychopath - that word is chosen quite deliberately: he was a bigotted workplace bully who created workplaces that were riven by fear, despair, and rabid competition at all costs, and drove me and, I suspect, others to the point of suicide. 

He consistently took an anti-progressive stance on all legislation, and gloated (drooler, almost) when our worst Premier ever controlled the state in the 1990s. 

One of the matters he was trying to drive employees into was having them take out professional indemnity, rather than the company paying for it. 

His dream was for all employees to be sub-contractors that he could call up at a moment’s notice, use them for exactly how many seconds he wanted them, and then send them home - with no care whatsoever whether they could afford to live or not. 

That attitude was quite common at the time - and typical of the pushback of those rich elites who were greedy (not all were then, not all are now) and pushed back against anything that either reduced their ability to make money or increased their taxes. 

In fact, driving people who were actually employees to become pretend sub-contractors (which was something that made their short term numbers look better, but cut down on community spending power and thus hurt businesses - apart from the costs of compensation for harm done, plus avoidable errors from excessive work intensity) became such a major problem that the Australian Tax Office actually stepped in and developed guidelines to make sure those avaricious, worker-hating bosses who were trying to bludgeon (and it felt like being bludgeoned - endlessly, and at ever increasing levels) employees into becoming pretend sub-contractors didn’t get away with it.

And that was the start of a backlash against the reactionary backlash. 

Today, nearly four decades later, neoliberalism is still infesting and destroying the world (so a few people can be the richest corpses in the graveyard), and it was, IMO, part of the influences behind the recent registration of engineers in my home state ... BUT the company I work for had no hesitation in actively telling engineer employees to advise that SMEC’s PI covers us - in fact, many companies these days are starting to head back into responsible community presence, and are ahead of many governments around the globe in many ways. 

Take that and eat, manager from the 80s. The world does not progress linearly towards the better, and it may take centuries or even millennia, but it generally gets there in the end.