> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.

And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.

In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.

But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.