Hacker News Reader

True value was probably the wrong phrasing here. More accurate would be “relative value”; The value you as an employee bring in vs your cost. Employers are arbitraging between these values to generate a profit. Businesses have to make more money than they pay their employees.

This particular phrasing just happened to strike a chord for me. It’s likely Marxism 101 but I’m not well versed on economics.

View on HN

If you're working in a team of 10 people, it's unlikely you could get whatever it is you're doing done in 10x the time it takes the team. In many cases, you couldn't do it at all, and your value without the employer would be 0.

I don't see how this refutes anything GP or GGP is saying.

What I mean is, when you join a team and that team is more productive than if each member were working alone, then every member of the team's value is higher when they are a member of that team.

How is that exploitation?

You require capital to survive. If you have no capital, the ways to get some are welfare, charity, inheritance, or employment. Barring the first three, your only option to get capital is to seek and get employment. The operative word being "only" here, this relationship is inherently nonconsensual, and a power dynamic emerges between employer and employee where the employee is cornered to bending to the employer's demands. If another employer offers better terms, you may "choose" to switch employers, but this is a false choice as that power dynamic never goes away. How this relationship plays out in practice comes down to the employer's behaviors and how much they want to exploit that power dynamic, and by transitivity the employee.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com