I guess it comes down to your definition of "exploitation", whether that's bad, and whether you consider employment to be a mutually exploitative arrangement (which I could get behind, though I think it's not a bad thing).
If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.
The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.
I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.
I think a problem with what you said is that you are evaluating how much someone can earn in comparison to a race to the bottom with other workers. The proper comparison is how much money the business is making as a whole.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US GDP is ~20T, if everyone made an equal amount before taxes, that would be somewhere around 120k (a little more or less as workers are about half the economy).
You can see from that comparison that the level of exploitation is far higher than than you supposed.
If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.
The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.
I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.