> “Employment relationships are fundamentally exploitative though.”
that you a priori assume this makes me sad. a company has no fundamental right to a power differential over an employee.
an employment agreement is between two equal parties looking for a fair value exchange. with that said, of course power differentials often exist in those situations (unfortunately), but it doesn’t always have to. that’s one of the reasons everyone should always apply to multiple jobs at once, and hopefully get multiple offers, so you have leverage in the employment negotiations.
and the best managed organizations consider managers to be support staff with decision-coalescing responsibilities rather than overlords.
an employment agreement is between two equal parties looking for a fair value exchange.
That you can believe and type that with a straight face, makes me boggle. Ideally, maybe. Employee-owned cooperatives, maybe.
One side is a non-human entity, a multi-multi-millionaire with on-tap access to an economy full of high spec legal, financial, and any other kind of consultant. Working on decades of procedures and organizational habits buit from the experiences of hundreds of humans, with many human brains and many years of time-horizon to research any given topic, fronted by the humans selected for being good at "playing the selction game" - convincing, manipulating, looking the part, extracting as much as possible from employees.
The other side is a person, who can spare a small fraction of one human brain, with very limited money and access to resources, who has a Hobson's choice of "work or die of starvation".
It isn't two equal parties. It's barely even two /comparable/ parties.
and when was the last time you talked to someone who felt their employement was "fair value exchange"? Someone at the pub who felt their employer paid them enough, didn't ask too much of them - and wasn't boasting about having an unusually good situation?
In fact, when was the last time you talked to someone who /didn't/ dream of getting enough money to never work again? Would that be such a popular meme if people generally felt fairly treated, equal partners, in value-creating systems they participated in by choice?
A great example of the power vacuum however is non-competes and how prevalent they are in our industry. It's not just one person negotiating with another, it's one person negotiating with a company and an entire industry. An entire system designed to swing the balance in the favor of the company.
With my work experience the balance shifted a bit to me, giving me options to find companies without non-competes. When I first got started however, I didn't have an option to negotiate nor did I have the financial backing to challenge a non-compete if it ever became an issue. Ultimately this is where unions should come into play, but I highly doubt we'll ever see the tech industry unionize.
that you a priori assume this makes me sad. a company has no fundamental right to a power differential over an employee.
an employment agreement is between two equal parties looking for a fair value exchange. with that said, of course power differentials often exist in those situations (unfortunately), but it doesn’t always have to. that’s one of the reasons everyone should always apply to multiple jobs at once, and hopefully get multiple offers, so you have leverage in the employment negotiations.
and the best managed organizations consider managers to be support staff with decision-coalescing responsibilities rather than overlords.