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scardine

If you hate your job, someone may be taking advantage of you.

If you love your job, someone may be taking advantage of you.

Someone may be taking advantage of you. Or not. Who knows?

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If you love your job, you could be getting paid less. Clearly you are taking advantage of your employer.

If you hate your job, clearly you've stayed because they are offering more than any place that is better and you're taking advantage of your employer.

I'll have to apologize and return all this money.

If you hate your job you're automatically paying yourself less in stress offset. IMO stress and meaninglessness at work is not worth any $ at all

The parent comment to mine was facetiously showing how the employer is always taking advantage of the employee. I'm showing that it's "clearly" the other way around.

It's almost like it is an exchange of services and goods negotiated along a variety of criteria.

Depending on how you look at it, the employer is and isn't taking advantage of the employee, or the reverse, the employee taking advantage of the employer. But thinking too much about this is not healthy, it's good to just be aware of it. Thinking too much may make you jump ship and move around to other companies and potentially make more money but in the long run, i don't think this necessarily translates into happiness, productivity, etc.. The trick is to find the balance.

If you love your job, but hate your politicians, and your company's investors are laundering their profits through PACs to purchase said politicians, then your employer is—perhaps not so clearly—taking advantage of you.

And you should be paid more.

Have you ever counted out how much political money comes out of your paycheck before it reaches your house?

Taxes, FICA, health insurance and other benefits paid on my behalf come out of my paycheck.

What any investors or executives do with money that was never mine (aka “their profits”) is not “coming out of my paycheck.”

> money that was never mine is not “coming out of my paycheck.”

That's a funny way of looking at it. All value originates in the labor of people like you and me. It's only an accounting trick that any of it appears to end up in others' hands.

IMO, it's a more funny way of looking at it to think that money that no one ever agreed to pay me when I freely negotiated for my salary was somehow originally "mine".

It's a well-known fact that most people under-negotiate.

That is a bizzare POV. Labor has no inherent value on its own, it is only valuable in contexts when it can be used to benefit others. Constructing those contexts often requires capital expenditure. Labor believing that capital is unnecessary makes about as much sense as sales believing engineering is unnecessary (because we bring in all the money) or vice versa.

You will know you are being taken advantage of when your are verbally abused, given unreasonable deadlines and being asked to do jobs far outside your job description.

I think your comment sums up my working life better than the article.

and most of the time... Who cares?

In capitalism, by definition you are compensated less than the work you put in. The leftover is called "Surplus". And that is divvied up between the board,C levels, and shareholders (sometimes). The surplus is never split up to the ones who actually do the work.

I'm sure the complaint will be that I'm calling for state socialism. Nope. I'm calling for worker coops, and worker owned businesses. That way, we the workers can profit(positively or negatively) from our own input.

> "to the ones who actually do the work"

who gets to define what constitutes work?

It's pretty easy, if the person disappears, are the goods/services still provided? If so, then that person did not do anything which constituted work.

Who supplies the capital for worker co-ops? That's the problem, as I see it. Yeah, workers lose out on the surplus in typical company. However, workers aren't risking their own capital. If the company goes bankrupt, the worker only loses their job, not their investment (unless they took equity as part of a compensation package).

The workers of course - most small to medium sized law firms are worker co-ops where new members 'buy a seat', effectively adding their share of the working capital

That works well for law firms because law firms are built on human capital. How do you accomplish this with capital-intensive heavy industry such as automobile manufacturing?

If your plant is worth a billion dollars and you have 1000 employees, do you charge a new worker ~$1 million to "buy their seat?" And if so, how do you prevent an outside investor from "sponsoring" the million-dollar buy-in for multiple employees, in exchange for a cut of their wages (in effect, duplicating the capitalism we have right now)?

The above model situation is more-or-less identical to what you see with taxicab medallions in big cities like New York. There are taxicab companies who buy multiple medallions (at great cost) and rent them to drivers, contradicting our usual expectation that taxicab drivers are self-capitalized entrepreneurs.

Are they I though that was partnerships or really the v old guild mode.

Anteing is a very Spanish mondragon thing I haven't heard of it in the UK

> most small to medium sized law firms are worker co-ops

Really? Paralegals, secretaries etc. are equal full partners?

A partnership of professionals with wage-labor support staff isn't a labor coop.

You're right of course - the partners however do work this way, mostly I was trying to point out that a worker coop is not a new thing, or necessarily a communist lefty thing - forms of it have long been part and parcel of business

> I'm calling for worker coops, and worker owned businesses

I'm not being argumentative here; I just want to point out that Not everyone is Brilliant and Extraordinary, at least Not in their job. On the other hand--some people are.

On a personally note: a huge deciding factor in my getting out of a family business was due to an association that my late father had with a competitor. Yes he was much older, and of course more experienced, but I knew I could not compete with him. Period, end of story.

Furthermore, from the ten years I did run that business (and successfully by most metrics), I also met other people who ran other types of businesses, that were also just ridiculously talented at their work. People like that have almost a Sixth Sense about what to do, and what not to do and when to do it. I may have that in certain arenas, But I did not posses it in that family business.

This is what the oppressor vs oppressed narrative will get you. A constant state of trying to identify the group that is exploiting another even when such thing does not exist.

This thought is incredibly reductive and dismissive of abuse.

Not all relationships are between oppressor and oppressed, obviously. It does not mean they do not exist. The history of capitalism is especially rife with clear examples of those in power exploiting those lacking it. Power being capital or wealth.

Exploitation does not exist?

Has it ever?

Your comment sounds more like a soap box than interacting with the actual article.

> In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.

This is not normal and professional behavior.

Given that the Waltons family is worth more than the bottom billion people on the planet and their main achievement was being born from the right vagina, yes exploitation exists.

Now the question for that billion is, are the Waltons worth eating? Which I suppose depends on how badly the crops have failed that year.

Exploitation of labour is one of the basic concepts in capitalism. It is a social relationship based on an asymmetry in a power relationship between workers and their employers. Therefor it is independent of the fact if you love or hate your job.

Interesting that the comment got down-voted when it's practically a copy of the definition from wikipedia.

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