An employee is hired at will and largely vulnerable to employment risk. The employee has no legal claim to income earned by an employer beyond general compensation provided in the duration of employment. On the other hand, an investor, without major financial restructuring, can through equity or debt secure a claim with various degrees of seniority.

So, to counter your claim, an employee is exposed to downside through these terms.

The employee is almost always paid for work they have already done, except in extreme circumstances. There are substantial legal protections in place to assure this. There are entire divisions of Federal and State governments in place to ensure that employees get their wages for work they have already done.

The risk you're talking about is that they may not continue getting paid the future. They haven't done that work yet, that work may not even exist and need to be done yet, so of course there's no guarantee that they'll get paid for it.

In order to make it analogous to the risk an investor takes, the employee's deal would have to be something like "come in and work for 40 hours a week, if it turns out your work created a profit, you'll get a cut of that profit in a few months or years"

does payment to employees override payment to creditors/investors when a company goes belly up? I get the feeling that employees are secondary compared to the primary creditors.