“Exploitation” is the most exploited word of English language. Exploited by the Leftist thugs.
There is only one kind of “work” that can be called exploitation: bonded labour. Labour where man is forced to work against his will, and is paid whatever the one forcing him to work is ready to pay. Forcing requires violence, and if violence is present in the transaction, it is not market, it is not trade, it is not employer-employee relationship, it is a criminal enterprise, a mafia operation.
Excluding above, there is no exploitation in the world. One man offers a work, declares the wage, and pays the wage he declared after the piece of the work is complete, or after the hours of work are complete (as agreed in the beginning as to what will constitute as the completion of the transaction), then it is a clean, honest trade; not exploitation.
As for the wage itself, nobody in the world knows what is a just wage. NOBODY. It is a psychological phenomenon, and like all things psychological, defies quantification. In general, employer is always in search of those who can do the work for less than what he is paying now, and employees are always complaining that they deserve more. Even Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, may well be unsatisfied with his package, for all I know.
So, the bad news: Bad news is that our wage can be only that below which nobody else is ready to do the same work. You should read it twice: our wage can be only that below which nobody else is ready to do the same work.
So what does then the fraud called “minimum wage” mandated by government mean? Answer: same as bonded labour. Government is violence. It has guns, it has handcuffs, it has jail. So it can mandate anything it likes. But it can not mandate Economics to disappear. Nor arithmetic can be made to disappear by using guns. So what happens when a government announces minimum wages is that all the businesses whose products fail to sell in the market if the enhanced wage component is added to their cost, such businesses are simply shut down. Labour is just a means to an end, not an end in itself (that is why MNREGA is the biggest fraud ever conceived by man). The end is a product that is sold in the market. The producer, unlike government, has no guns. He has customers. If they are not ready or able to pay the new price, the producer goes out of business, with the unsold stock as the loss. And, many new businesses, whose products are unlikely to sell with the enhanced cost component of the mandated wages, are never started. So, unemployment ensues. That is, government violence has exactly the same effect as the gangster violence: it destroys the economy and creates unemployment.
So, if you feel you are being exploited, do anything, but do not seek the help of the Leftist. He will get his scotch and his Pushpa, and you will lose your job.
If you feel you are being exploited, you either try to look for a better paying job, try to get new skills, try to start a new business yourself, start with hawking if nothing else. Or take the train back to village. If all land there was sold by you or your father, use savings to buy some land. Buy buffaloes also. They will give you milk. Grow your food, grow your own cotton. Weave your own cloth. Construct your own home. Mud house or a straw hut, if you can not afford bricks. And lo, voila, nobody is exploiting you.
Tough? May be, but true. Nature did not make you born with the Right to a job with the wages you like. There are no “Rights” in nature. Rights are just our construct, products of our imagination. Some charlatan, some thug, some liar may come and tell you that government has a duty to give you job. But the ghost called government is again only our imagination. In reality, it is just another bunch of human beings given jobs by us for the tasks assigned to them at the wages we announced to them and which we pay. They have no jobs lying in their cupboards to which you have right. And they can not create the jobs. Even their jobs were created by us when we decided to constitute a government for ourselves. You may vote out any number of governments you want, they may even start frauds like MNREGA, but they can not give you job, they can only end up bankrupting themselves if they try to give you job, as MNREGA is bankrupting Indian government.
Your only choice is to chase away the Leftist from your country, force the government to completely free the economy, and slowly, your wages will start rising. More and more businesses will open, they will compete to hire you, and they will raise the wages on offer in the competition.
Not acceptable to you? Your choice, your freedom. I have no guns to force to do what I am suggesting. But then be ready to live in poverty, unemployment, and progressive decline. The wheel of Economics will continue to turn mercilessly, heartlessly. Economics is not afraid of your ally the Leftist thug and his guns. Economics did not fear even the nukes of Stalin. Stalin disappeared, not Economics. You can either ride the wheel of Economics and become ever richer, or get crushed by it.
