Now depending on your viewpoint you might say that wage labor is inherently exploitative
If you’re someone who does fishing for a living, self-employed, is the haggler exploiting you are you exploiting them? Is the other boat exploiting you if they undersell you?
If you barter with someone who hunts deer who is exploiting whom?
Or does exploitation only come into focus when it’s private capital (as opposed to state capital)?
Most people on this site would disagree with that view though.
Definition of exploit (Entry 2 of 2)
1 : to make productive use of : UTILIZE exploiting your talents exploit your opponent's weakness
2 : to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage
Is it unfair if you both mutually agree upon the trade?
If there is a transaction, there is always a risk of exploitation. Someone has the upper hand and someone is the party under more duress --sometimes the little guy and sometimes the big gal. Even when working towards a communal goal as someone in the thread mentioned. Maybe I don't care if the communal canal doesn't get built. Maybe I'm okay with dying of thirst, etc.
Also, I don’t think it follows that because someone does not care about all aspects of a person they are therefore dehumanizing them.
Who of us ever really cares about every single aspect of another person? Even your spouse or close family member will have parts of them that you don’t care to engage with. In fact they may choose to keep those aspects private from you, meaning you cannot care about them.
In an employer employee relationship I expect it is similar. The employer shouldn’t be allowed to delve into the parts of the employees life that are unrelated to the “trade” of service for wage. This type of snooping would be expected and maybe required if the employer was supposed to care about the person themselves.
Fundamentally this is about the right of the individual to alienate their labor. I can sell my labor to others, but nothing else. To sell your whole person is slavery. It seems wage earning is an innovation not an exploitation.
I guess I take the inverse conclusion. I think if you don't engage with people holistically, you're ultimately just using them for your own entertainment.
As for the employer-employee thing, I think it's helpful to come at this from the facts - we know that employee abuse, including very extreme forms, is both pernicious (it persists even when illegal) and ubiquitous, in the present, and in history. This suggests that there should be some structural reason.
So much of this stuff is just semantics.