Countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are very flat societies as well but have employee protection and comprehensive social systems. In every company I've worked in the CEO has had a cubicle with the rest of us, including a large multinational. I can approach a minister on the street and talk to them, even the prime minister (who I frequently see jogging around the neighborhood and even saw in a supermarket).
So I don't think a class system has anything to do with it.
In the large New Zealand companies I worked at, the CEO wouldn't make eye contact or even talk with you. Why would he? He worked hard to get his position and you're just a lazy minion. He also had his own office on another floor, .
Labour laws are for small companies, but even then they don't obey them. My first job out of university, at a small company, told me I was paid both a salary and a wage. A salary because then I didn't get paid for overtime (nor did it get recorded), and a wage because then they didn't need to pay me that much. Take it or be unemployed. True, I could have just turned it down, but by being registered with the Work and Income people, I had a contract requiring that I took the first "reasonable" job offered, without a definition of reasonable. That particular one owes me about $20k in unpaid wages.
The next one, a multimillionaire with the Prime Minister's office on speed dial, owes me about $10k. Complaints (multiple complaints, at that) about them to the ministry have a habit of just disappearing. Personal safety threats, basic rights violations, serious health and safety issues, public funding fraud, inaccurate time sheets, and less-than-minimum-wage pay, but not one visit from the ministry.
There's no doubt that a class system is in play there.
Your experience is completely at odds with my own, I've always found senior management, politicians, and the wealthy to be very approachable and friendly, this even includes my teenage job at a rural Waikato abattoir stuffing pig colons into bags in the offal room. I guess your experience shows that there are elitist pricks everywhere, but to be honest if I had a boss that didn't treat me as an equal then I wouldn't work for or with them.
You'd be right, but oddly when they did they layout the staff areas were the ones with the sea view, the CEO just looked at another building across the road.
So I don't think a class system has anything to do with it.