Lack of Union representation plays a major part in the lack of decent Ts&Cs but it goes further than that.. As I said, there's an unhealthy fear that one senses, just below the surface due to lack of social security programs. Also that working hard towards our first heart-attack will impress the guys at the top and when the axe comes around we'll avoid the chop. There's also the effect of the perpetual myth that the US is a land of success and that simply by working your butt off "you can make it " ... this helps generate a culture of independant striving for the top rather than a concern for the general good... this striving for individual success works against a coordinated effort to improve the groups welfare as a whole.
I work with FSI, a Berkshire Hathaway company owned by Warren Buffet and a company that you might expect to offer excellent working conditions... in fact, we get just 10 days holiday per year for the first 5 years! (With no time off for Easter and a guaranteed one day for Xmas) The Farnborough center being in the UK has to offer competitive conditions resulting in the people there getting ( I believe ) 30+ days per year..
The culture is such that when I mentioned to a colleague that we had a minimum of 30 days holiday in th UK his response was ... "WOW... That's way too much" .
The shareholders love this sort of naive dedication to the company and are laughing all the way to the Caymen Islands.
American companies (inc FSI) love to foster another myth that we're all part of a large family and that we're all as vital to the operation as the CEO be our position ever so humble... fact is we're about as vital as the photo-copier and like the photo-copier will be out of the door the moment the company spots the opportunity to increase its profit margins...
Like many of my generation I loathed the excesses of the large Unions that brought the UK to its knees in the 70s but over here the pendulum is way too far in the other direction...
Tony Blair made a statement in Parliament in defense of the US stating that he "judged a country by how many people wanted to live there "... My immediate reaction was that it wasn't 'how many' that mattered but 'who' wanted to live there... the fact that a queue of Haitians, Guatamalans and people from Somalia is always forming outside of a US embassy doesn't necessarily indicate that the streets here really are paved with gold.