It could be thought of as a form of theft. You’ll only ever get back a small fraction of the real value you produce while your owners get fat on the rest. Your only hope is to “climb the ladder” to increase the size of your share, while decreasing your workload, but that becomes less likely with each rung and each passing year. Or “be your own boss” and become one of the owners. But that’s hard to do if you actually care about others, because it’s zero-sum - someone, somewhere will lose in order for you to win. We’re taught to only focus on the winning side of things. And if someone else loses, well that’s their problem, they mustn’t have tried hard enough.
That’s one reason “be your own boss” and “side-hustles” are so popular among the incels and others who lack empathy, and make the majority of us cringe. And how gullible (but otherwise good) people are vulnerable to pyramid schemes, like MLMs. “Someday, you’ll be rich” is the lie that’s told to us. And a hopeful person is very very useful for their owners. That’s someone who will show up to work and slobber all over their owners’ knobs with enthusiasm each and every day.
There are “good” companies out there (maybe “less bad” is more accurate): co-ops, worker-owned businesses, public companies with generous stock options, public benefit corporations, b-corps and such, but all of those combined are still only a tiny fraction of businesses. There’s a reason you see capitalism going after unions, ESG and such. Even the financially solid, profitable businesses are eventually at risk if they’re seen as pro-worker.
All workers need to understand that they have inherent value just by being a human person. You are not your job, not your job title, not your salary or the amount of currency in your account. You are not your assets. You are definitely not your likes and replies. Those things should be nowhere near your core identity. The root of your identity should be your inherent value as a human being. If you are a human being reading this, you have infinite inherent value (yes, even if you’re an owner). At least one person believes this, hopefully at least two, even for just a moment. This is what is meant by “raising class consciousness”. Yeah, it can get annoying, but it requires constant reminders and vigilance. If it seems childish, of course it is, because even children understand this and they will operate from this understanding before they are programmed to become good little worker bees who like sucking the knobs of their exploiters.
So yeah, sorry for the rant, but it is theft from a worker’s POV, even if it happens bit-by-bit, year-by-year as protections and benefits are slowly chipped away at to tilt things in favor of our owners – even when it happens perfectly “legally” through the prescribed channels by the powers that be, because the owners love to change the laws, too, I would place it in the same category.
Even beyond the semantics, though, if someone is trying to tell you that working for them is what’s missing in your life, that you’re not good enough until you’re working under an owner, that spending your life’s energy providing labor in return for peanuts is the highest virtue achievable, that is actually one of the worst kinds of theft, IMHO. Being passed around the marketplace your entire life, bought and sold between owners like some commodity until you’re no longer useful should not be seen as a decent, acceptable way to live. To me it is actually the highest form of theft, as it attempts to directly supplant our original identity as inherently valuable, infinitely precious beings, and replace that with a corrupted perversion of what it means to live as a human who brings value to society.
With a bit more thought, there is a kernel of truth in the lie. What you’re saying is true, that we’re primed to think of wealth as a virtue. But who among us doesn’t think they need the money, if it could solve particular problems or make life just a little more comfortable/decent, for ourselves or someone we know. That’s what makes it so seductive I guess.