The issue seems to be when there is no specific company but an employee technically belongs to some company or organization otherwise they could be called bums or politicians. Being an employee implies a company/organization relationship somewhere but not a specific one. Also employees can work for more than one company/organization. When the specific company context is required then your original works /companies/{companyName}/users/{id}
Lets say you want to know the EmployerContribution for your ira/rsp/pension you'd use:
/companies/enron/users/fred/EmployerContribution
You get the specific amount contributed by enron (or $0).
What if you want the EmployerContributions from any or all companies fred works(ed) for?
You don't need a concrete company for it to make sense. /companies/any/employee/fred/EmployerContribution
Where "any" is obviously an abstraction or placeholder when the employee's company doesn't matter but being an employee does. You need to intercept the 'company" handler to prevent a db lookup (although not sure why company wouldn't be cached? how many can there be?)
You can even change the abstraction to represent something like all companies for which Fred was employed over the last 10 years.
/companies/last10years/employee/fred/EmployerContribution
