Um, I'm pretty sure that people who become employees of a company also do so of their own volition, and based on their own assessment of the costs, benefits and risks involved. Anybody who has ever received a job offer from a start-up company knows about that. Anybody who takes a job without thinking hard about the long-term stability of the company in question isn't doing their due diligence. And employees who choose to take equity in place of salary in their compensation plan *are* shareholders, and the extent to which they are hurt through that equity is exactly the extent to which all shareholders are hurt.
Employees are also capable of assessing the trajectory of a company on their own. They may be in a better position to do so than outside shareholders: they're often closer to actual operations, and they feel the impact of bad management directly. I have been in the position of working for a failing company; when I decided that it had no future I changed jobs. It took them another two years to finally crater all the way in. Those who think and plan do better than those who don't, whether they're on the board of directors or not.
What I object to is the notion that the employees are all innocent victims and the board members/senior managers are all corrupt and venal. As an employee I resent the implication that I have no control over my own work life, and I know from observation that there are a lot of good senior executives who work their assess off for the success they have. The business world is a lot more complicated than simple class-warfare rhetoric would suggest.
While the boards of directors of comporations are often comprised of investors or investment fund representatives who have only a small portion of their capitol at stake in any one venture - it is right to point out that this is not true for all companies. Some of the board members of Zenimax for example are not there because they are outside investors (though if you look at the list of members you can spot quite a few who are investment moguls). Some of them are there because when the companies they created with their own hands were incorperated or purchased by a larger company part of the process included sufficient voting stock in the company to warrant a seat on the board. This is more common than you may think as investors do prefer to invest in companies where at least some of the board members are dedicated to the operations of that company- a board wholly comprised of dispassionate investors with large portfolios will not be focused on day to day operations and minutia and therefore not be as well apprised of the true performance of their investment.
So as far as how much you can blame a board of directors for running a company into the ground is about as much as you can credit them for the success of the company - which is to say it is less than you probably think. Even boards of smaller creative companies with some members who may have been responsible for its founding aren't really pulling the levers that direct the ship of industry. They have final authority on many matters but ultimately the operation of the company relies on the decisions and good faith of the executive officers.
Compared to a graphic artist, coder, or "founding" board member (think semi retired guy who built the place up from the ground as opposed to outside investor - most boards have someone like that or one of their kids but they're usually a small minority of the board itself) the executive officers CAN be the most mobile, most priveleged to information about the true health of the company, most protected when it fails, and most able to avert such failure.
While I'll agree that these arguments tend to be over colored with the cliched rhetoric you take offense at- I can see how it looks to many here like you are trying to establish a false equivalency between the few at the helm and the individual employee in general. While personal responsibility and self-determination are realities at all levels, it is disingenuous to suggest there is not unequal mobility and responsibility.
1) Employees can not diversify their employment portfolio. Your eggs are all in one basket for the most part and any savings you have accumulated are still derivative of that one primary source of income. Dividing your time among several companies would be the equivalent risk management that investors are able to do - were it a viable option. In fact most employees in jobs from Radioshack salesman to Cisco network engineer will sign broad non-compete clauses that further.
2) Depending on bankruptcy and restructuring laws, employee compensation packages such as general pension funds can, and often are, the least protected asset during restructuring. The compensation packages for executives on the other hand tend to be guaranteed much more rigorously under the language in their employment contracts- to the point where executives who are removed for incompetence by the board for bankrupting the company will still retain the majority of their severance packages.
3) While employees who pay attention should have a general idea as to the health of a company - executive officers are the first to know and have some (legally limited) control over when the full reality of a company's troubles are made known. That's part of the idea behind the much hated golden parachute. In theory their stock in the company (when market and financial regulators aren't asleep or high) should be the least mobile as any early selling on their part would bring immediate suspicion after the fact. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like the watchdogs are at their posts unless it involves Martha Stewart or you happen to be responsible for brownouts in the most populus state in the US (sorry I'm not as familiar with how well the regulators do their job elsewhere.)
The thing is though... we don't know if any of that applies to the board of JoWood or its executives. Their executives may not have golden parachutes. Their board of directors is probably not very much involved with the day to day operations and probably does not make the kinds of decisions that sunk the company besides their hiring choices.
If they are structured like most US corporations, then yeah it would be right to say the executives and the board members are far less hurt by the failure of a company they commanded legal and operational responsibility for. Are they - seriously anyone work there or know someone who can answer that? Also, anyone able to say at which decisions were the ones that sunk them? Is it the fault of the board for hiring executives who could not steer the business well or is it the fault of the project directors/middle managment who seemed to have a similar theory on QA as Bethesda does at times? Yeah- it is far more complex than just saying "The people in charge screwed it up and get to walk away with millions" but it's not hard to see why that seems to be the case far to often.
Of course that just might be because nobody cares about a news story "Borkerage firm collapses under the weight of mild incompetence distributed randomly through their ranks and all are greatly inconvenienced at the loss of their job." I bet that would be a more accurate headline for most bankruptcies of smaller corporations. Still, when a ship runs aground it's the captain whose supposed to hang his head in shame and not the entire enlisted crew from deckhand to assistant cook.
/rant - sorry about that