Employees as parts and replaceable

Recent issue of Time magazine has a featured article about the iconoclastic CEO, Tadashi Yanai, of the Japan's famous casual clothing brand, Uniqlo. His maxim, "to change or to die", has transformed his tiny menswear shop into a globally well-known brand, including one flagship store on the Fifth Avenue in New York City. His success and his non-Japanese-style management has made him the modern Akio Morita, former iconic CEO of Sony in the 1980s. I am especially struck and actually deeply empathetic by his statement, "Traditional Japanese companies treat their employees as family. Uniqlo thinks employees are only parts and something replaceable". This is how I feel in the U.S. and this philosophy of "employees as parts" may, unfortunately, be a better adopted methodology in this highly competitive 
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2142492,00.html