Published on: June 17, 2025 at 7:00 pm
Even if you don’t work in agriculture, domestic service, construction, manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare, beauty salons, or restaurants—all industries prone to worker exploitation—your employer might still be taking advantage of you. Sweatshop and forced labor aside, common types of worker exploitation include wage theft, unsafe working conditions, a toxic organizational culture, bullying, harassment, and discrimination.
Academy of Management Scholar Jaqueline “Jackie” Coyle-Shapiro of California State University, San Bernardino, and the London School of Economics—who cowrote The Employee-Organization Relationship: Applications for the 21st Century with Lynn Shore and Lois Tetrick—said that she and her colleagues have been tracking the rise of non-traditional employment relationships. Many of these benefit employers and shareholders at the expense of employees and other stakeholders.
“We’ve got the gig economy; we’ve got lots of platform work, also known as crowd work or crowdworking, and so what is this doing to alter employee-employer relationships?” Coyle-Shapiro said. “The question I’m particularly interested in is: To what extent is this providing the fertile ground for organizations to exploit employees?
“Exploitation of employees occurs primarily because employers have greater power in the relationship, but also employees may feel that they don’t have viable employment alternatives,” she said.
A more traditional example is the U.S. healthcare system, which is structured around private for-profit insurers and third-party administrators who have come under criticism for ballooning costs and denying doctor-recommended medical procedures and medications. When maximizing profit is an organization’s top priority, other stakeholders’ interests—treating employees well, paying them fairly, and providing the best care—are not prioritized to the same extent or, in some cases, at all. That contributes to many Americans’ dissatisfaction with the healthcare system as a whole, as well as some healthcare workers’ low morale and burnout.
“An underlying factor might be this notion that organizations are getting greedy, and as a result of that, engaging in perhaps more sophisticated exploitation practices towards their different stakeholders,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “That’s a more general trend.
“Organizations that lost a lot during the pandemic are now trying to recoup some of those losses by becoming more profitable,” she said. “As a result of looking for ways to increase profitability, they end up taking advantage of their stakeholders, including employees, customers or patients, and surrounding communities.”
