It's no coincidence that so many big businesses need government assistance and ultimately need to be bailed out. I think in a voluntaryist society you would probably not see such levels of centralisation because they tend towards big inefficient bureaucracies. And the free market tends to punish inefficiency.
Yes; everything government does to subsidize big business would no longer be possible, making it more efficient for local business to flourish, than for one huge business to have a store in every city, some on every other street (like McDonalds.) In this way, the hierarchies go away on their own; since local business does not need to pay the overhead of corporations, they keep more of their profits, and thus are able to pay their own employees better wages.
Not to mention, with low-level work being replaced steadily by machines, it seems we're on our way, as a species, to every job being highly skilled work that only humans are capable of. It seems more important than ever, then, for any economy to thrive, that people not be trained to be mindless workers, but just the opposite, thinking and participating. The hierarchy seems to push this idea, where you have the few who think and the many who work; perhaps this is the natural push for people to take more control of their work, which would make those hierarchies smaller, since the low-level work only becomes more and more scarce.
Although, of course even small businesses have a hierarchy of sorts. It is just a lot smaller and closer. There is generally someone/people who own the business. There will always be people more experienced who will be able to steer a business better than those less experienced. We all start out inexperienced and then gain knowledge and experience as we go along. Well, not all of us...
I agree with you about the big hierarchies generally being for the worker bees and that work is becoming more specialised and the lower level stuff being mechanised which is further driving the decentralisation trend. I've walked away from contracting for businesses myself and generally now do my own work and am looking to do more so in the future. Not to mention the fact I can do it over the internet so I don't have to live close to work anymore. Or even in the same country.
Regarding the paying better wages, I think inflation is the killer in this regard. I think wages would generally go down, as all prices do in a deflationary environment, but people's gains in experience would offset this and that prices of products in general would go down faster. I think in a free market it's likely that people would be in high demand. Because at the end of the day, we are the smartest most capable "robots" out there. No robot can match even the dumbest humans yet. When robots can match us, we're all out of jobs anyway at that point, but I think that is a long way off and I think we will merge with machines before that happens. But that's a whole other topic...
