Based on the (removed) comments on a post today, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of WHY work under capitalism is extra terrible, versus just memes and organized labor and stuff, so let me try and break it down a little more.
The reason wages are consistently suppressed is because every dollar the owner(s) don’t pay you, they get to put directly into their own pocket (in the form of profits). The only incentive to pay more is if they can’t get workers, and since they ALL try to pay as little as possible, jobs across almost all fields see a constant decrease in wages (esp with inflation adjusted dollars).
In ADDITION, under capitalism, the owner has full control over “their” workforce, they get to have their own little dictatorship. The workers do not own the company, they don’t get any final say in how things are run. Currently the only power you have as a worker is to quit, and try to find another job where you will labor away for the benefit of the owner.
Every dollar the owner takes as “profit” is a dollar YOU should be paid, as YOU’RE the one producing the work, the whole product depends solely on the worker. So I’m that sense, the owners are stealing your wages in the form of profits for them. It gets a little more complicated with owners who work (such as many small business owners), but really they should be being paid for their value as a worker, not as an “owner”. In an ideal world, the workers would all also be the owners, so “profits” would go directly to the people actually generating them, aka the workers.
These major parts of capitalism are why we have such shit wages, shit jobs, shit treatment, and politicians that only work for their rich donors/owner class. Only when the workers have the power/ownership can we start to see modern work improve. This is why unions fight so hard for ownership, why collective bargaining is so effective (because in mass we have much more leverage), and why understanding the labor theory of value is so important.
The worker class and owner class are directly opposed, please stop capping for your oppressors. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.