My opinion boils down to the following: Just because you feel you are exploited doesn’t mean you are actually exploited. Exploitation should be protected by the government. If the company is following the law, they are simply not exploiting their employees. However, if you can’t get over that feeling of exploitation you have a couple of options: You can quit and that ends the perception of continuing exploitation. Alternatively, you can convince enough fellow coworkers of the grievance and unionize to try and force change.
If you cannot or will not do either of those things, you are choosing to trade your labor for a paycheck.
I do take issue with this line. Law is slow moving and reactionary, not proactive. Courts frequently update the law and redefine that abuse by nature of someone being abused and having the capacity and willingness to sue. The law defines things through historical action. That is, someone has to be wronged first.
I do agree that perception isn't reality though. But that's a whole other issue. Were law proactive I'd be in more agreement with your sentiment. But laws follow the culture just like markets follow the economy. There's a delay
I realize that this timing disconnect is a slippery slope especially in a historical context, but I think in modernity the recognition is much quicker and frankly at this point there is probably not a lot of truly exploitive things that need additional regulation going on by companies in the US who corporately are trying to follow the law.
For employees protecting themselves, if things are happening at a larger scale, would that not also exhibit as distress at first? Assuming the abuse does exist, we also think about what the societal "immune response" would look like. A meme is just an analog to a virus in social thought, not necessarily bad, and it means we can create analogies to the immune system. What's hard about all of this is that you're right that sometimes the immune system attacks itself unnecessarily.
Arguably we agree that we see the immune response acting up. Now we have to ask if the immune response is appropriate or not. This is hard, because we ourselves may or may not have come into contact with the infection and the system's response is extremely noisy. But determining that determines how we resolve the problem. And no matter the conclusion, a problem exists. Sometimes the immune system attacks the right thing, we just can't see what it is attacking. Sometimes it attacks the wrong thing, so we need to look at why they look alike and how to differentiate. But in no case does it attack itself with no reason. (even a bad reason is a reason)
And yes, historically we see both this and an extremely slow response from the government (idk, virologists in our analogy? Doesn't matter). In the gilded age we saw tons of abuse run rampant before they were addressed. Things were considered normal and common that we'd see as horrific (e.g. per-adolescent children working in factories and losing fingers). There's a reason we got labor unions and many workers rights from this time. Even if you believe the defenses degraded and malformed over time, that's why they came to be. And if you do believe that, it is even worrying because it means we're not ready to handle the next infection. Even if this isn't an infection, we are humans and can think proactively and want to address things when they are small issues and build defenses before they become big issues. So even small infections are worth scrutiny. Just the same way maintenance of any system (biological, mechanical, software, social, etc) reduces overall costs and prevents larger damage from ever happening in the first place (but counterfactuals are fun...).
So from this standpoint, I'd just say "listen." I'm not sure what the real problem is (got some ideas), but it is clear there is a problem and I'm afraid the way you frame it is dismissive. Even entitlement itself is a problem and we'd still have to listen carefully to address that.
But the next two paragraphs I find a bit confusing. I had originally started with a discussion of possible miscommunication, which in the current response I believe you agree with. But your response to that comment was about how you do not believe an employee should be _forced_ to compatible. I took this to mean with respect to wages and with that respect a minimum wage is that forced mechanism. But it seems you agree. Maybe I'm too primed in the thinking that it makes interpretation difficult. At least in this regard to this, I do not think the federal standard meets the demands of the current environments. Nor do I think many states. I think this issue is rather complicated though because the minimum requirements are highly non-homogeneous across even a singular state. I'm not quite sure what the solution to this is, but maybe you have some ideas. There is some balance in there that prevents low wage workers from being priced out, required to bus/train in with long commutes, and maintain high wages for SWEs and C-suite. The oversimplification of the problem I think makes the solution difficult as first order approximations or narrow framings aren't "good enough."
But thinking carefully, I can see that that interpretation may be wrong, or wrong enough. Because I think we're close in position (ironically not an uncommon case in people that disagree). Maybe you meant that there should not be tight restrictions in maintaining that employee, such as we see in more European structures? I think we'd at least both agree that the government's role in this is mainly to ensure that there is healthy and strong competition within the market. I think it matters where on that scale of employer/employee market we are, where people think we are, and where they think we're headed. We should want that employee market, as I think everyone benefits the most here (even that top 0.01%, but not visible through their bank accounts). I do think 5+ years back SWEs was clearly an employee market, which likely even built a lot of entitlement. But I think we quickly shifted to an employer market, making people's stress go up, and even causing overestimation of that scale.
I do think these changes cause resentment regardless of the income level. I can understand someone being frustrated even making $200k/yr WFH when they see friends let go, the company say they have to tighten the reigns on perks/income/employees, all while seeing stock and C-suite compensation go up or even be the same. These are conflicting signals. Static friction is quite a force too. In this respect I don't agree that an employer should be forced to do anything either. In fact, we are on an incubator website and I would encourage those people to take their frustrations out by competition rather than regulation. After all, this was the game being played between the capitalists and the soviets: a market economy vs a planned economy. But I think too that people underestimate the heavy hand that was being used. Not so much the invisible hand of Smith, but rather invisible because it tilted scales and purposefully hid. Maybe the market is too captured. Maybe not. I will at least say it is easy to get caught up in one of the two dominant narratives that has permeated our culture with respect to wealth inequality. But I don't think either of those narratives are particularly helpful as they do not capture the complexity of the issues we are facing and themselves end up only being noise and even make conversations like these difficult as we are now primed so well it is easy to misinterpret and jump to each other's throat. Especially when we see these conflicting signals, they do give each narrative evidence to their claims. Possibly even saying the same thing in different ways and building frustration as we feel unheard. Most of language is implicit after all, and it is hard to know intent or reception through a screen. I do appreciate your comment though, as I think you have brought up things I wasn't thinking about and made me think deeper. I also think conversations like these do start to heal our community. I appreciate the lack of brevity. The world is complicated and language is imprecise, I'd rather slow down and truly communicate, even if it is harder.