Published on: July 8, 2025 at 10:05 pm
Exploitation isn’t limited to sweat-shop laborers and illegal immigrants. While agriculture, food-delivery, and healthcare are three of the sectors with the most workers who feel they’re being exploited, many professionals are treated unfairly—or feel they’re being treated unfairly—by their employers.
That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Jaqueline “Jackie” Coyle-Shapiro of California State University, San Bernardino, and the London School of Economics (LSE), who cowrote an Academy of Management Journal article on this topic with Ephrat Livne-Ofer of LSE and Jone Pearce of the University of California, Irvine. They noted that the idea of exploitation has received a lot of attention in other fields yet is conspicuously absent in management and organizations research.
“When we think about exploitation, our natural tendency is to think about immigrants that may not be legal residents in that particular country where they are working being exploited by employers or small businesses where they’re overworked,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “They’re not paid a lot; their health isn’t taken care of, and so they’re vulnerable because of their immigrant status.”
Coyle-Shapiro and colleagues from Aalto University in Finland are currently researching the extent to which platform workers who deliver food feel that their immigration status makes them vulnerable to exploitation by companies such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, Seamless, Grubhub, Instacart, ChowNow, Deliveroo, and Postmates. They’re also doing research work on exploitation in Portugal, gauging to what extent hospital workers feel exploited by their employers.
“We’re examining to what extent that exploitation is structurally based in terms of the systems and human-resource-management practices in the organization, versus to what extent it’s more relationally based in the sense that upper management and leaders within the organization are taking advantage of employees,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “What this suggests is that exploitation may be a lot more prevalent than low-paid, vulnerable immigrants that may not be legal in a particular country.
“We’re looking at how organizations may be exploiting professional employees, and one question that that I have is, ‘To what extent do employees need to be exploited in order to make a difference?’” she said. “If we think about employees that are passionate about providing the best healthcare possible, and so they have this calling or innate desire to make a difference to society, to what extent that puts them in a position where they’re vulnerable to exploitation by their employer.
“That’s raising a question about who’s carrying the burden of making a difference or having an impact in society: Is it the employee through going above and beyond the call of duty, working extra hours, or is it the organization whose purpose propels them to making a positive impact in society?”
