This is a half rant, half sanity check.
Up until now I believed that work was a fair transaction between the employee and the employer. You sell a bit of your time and in turn get an injection of cash money to do whatever you want to do. Your employer buys a bit of your time and gets some profit out of it to do whatever they want to do.
This is of course uglier in the real world. Employees "get through the day" and dream of weekends where their time is their own. Anyone who has gone through the interview process knows how disrespectful it is at all levels - on the lower level you're forced to pee in a cup whereas on a higher level you're forced to solve stupid puzzle games. Both of these activities server to reduce the perceived risk of employing you. As if going through years of schooling and any earlier jobs don't somehow demonstrate this. In return you are promised stability - so how come you can't force your boss to pee in a cup? How can you be sure his promise of stability is without risk?
This is the highest level of angst against this system. It still seems pretty rational, just a bit broken. Let's go a level deeper.
Every dollar you earn from your employer most likely gets consumed - rent, food, leisure. A tiny fraction of it might go to a 401k or Roth IRA. However, a large part of the profit your employer makes becomes his operating capital, meaning, he uses that dollar to make more dollars. You're given just enough to get by whereas your employer is growing every minute of every workday.
In economic terms, his market position is strengthening. He gets more capital to spend, the number their employees grows, his influence and most importantly - bargaining power - grows. You stay in place. You get promotions which just cover inflation. Then, when you decide to change your job, what with your tiny position in the market, you must subjugate yourself to a stronger player.
In my most recent contract, there was a clause specifying that I am expected to work unpaid overtime in "times of need" of the company. Did anyone ever see a contract that said that the company is expected to reward the employee in excess of his normal renumeration in times of need of the employee? Basically, you are the company's bitch. This is why people are upset about their work - bad working conditions. Why would management improve working conditions if you're not a human to them? If they really wanted to, they could force you to come to work naked.
This isn't US-centric. Take a social democracy place like Germany for example. There's a tax there that grows along with your income, to some high maximum amount, so unless you're making tons of money, you're making about as much as everyone else. This means you have no way to gather capital of your own, no way of straying from the default path of "work, retire, and die". Sure, you got decent health care and close-to-free higher ed, but that's like having a more comfortable cage. Becoming a freelancer or a small business is highly disincentivized via a massively complicated bureaucracy and high taxes - get this - when you become a freelancer in Germany, you have to specify your estimated income for the next two years and you're taxed, every quarter, not by how much you made that quarter, but on the estimated income. How fucked up is that? Say you broke both your hands and can't work for 6 months - you're still paying income tax.
This really got to me after getting fired from a startup and seeing how the owner, having gotten a nice pile of capital from VCs, didn't do jack shit, ever. He's getting paid, he's got wage slaves to do his bidding, and he's set with any financial/managerial career after his startup tanks. The straw that broke the camel's back? After getting fired, my ex-coworkers told me about how amazing it is now because they get to generate and build their own ideas. Get it? They not only have to do what they were hired to do, they get to build the business for this guy. This guy outsourced leadership and management to the employees themselves so he can travel and rub elbows with even more of his kind at expensive conferences. What a fucking prick.
The system is stacked against the individual, no matter how you play it. You can game it to some extent, if you're quick and careful, but you're relying on the big, slow, market entities to ignore you. Once they do, you're done for.
Hopefully, there's more and more attention paid to this in the form of "why the fuck are we still working 40+ hour work weeks and not getting anything out of it?":
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainab...u-negotiationshttp://www.theatlantic.com/business/...ngle_page=true
