If you go into a store and steal 15 dollars you will go to jail, but if you work a job for 15 dollars an hour, do 5 hours of work and only get paid for 4, you have to take it up with HR, file a formal complaint, have it be ignored, then get written up or fired for being a troublemaker.
If you are an exempt, salaried employee and you work more than the allotted time your job requires you just donated your labor for free.
If a job doesn’t give you a raise higher than the cost of living increase in inflation you got a pay cut.
If you work at Walmart, but your salary is so low you can only afford to buy clothes and goods at Walmart, then you are donating labor for goods at Walmart’s mark up. They are essentially getting your labor plus 30% in value.
If you drive a pickup truck with nothing in it every day, you are paying a gas company for the right to have a truck.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor, that is a myth forced upon the working class to devalue certain categories of labor. There is only specialized labor and generalized labor but both are needful and necessary. If you think that people working at a fast food job don’t have to hone their skills or there aren’t veterans on the job you have never worked a day in your life.
Two weeks of vacation per year means that most workers will work for 92.3% of their lives after they start working. Most people do not take two weeks of vacation per year.
If you have a 30 minute commute you spend 10.8 full days commuting per year.
If you could work from home during the pandemic and your employer cites “metrics”, “analysis” or “models” as a reason to return you to the office they actually calculated some truly morbid statistics, like how many would contract COVID and die if they worked in the office, how much they think inconveniencing you might cause you to quit, and the likelihood that someone may choose not to return and they would need to terminate.
You donate commuting time to your job.
Gas price increases decrease your salary if you have a long commute.
Some jobs pay wildly different salaries for the exact same work even internally, this is one reason they penalize discussing salary, because they don’t want some workers to know how badly they are being screwed.