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Of course, you're being exploited by your employer. Unless you're a worker in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran or China, like it or not, you're part of a capitalist economy. Although those who run communist or dictatorship states always use exploitation as a dirty word, it has proven over the past two hundred years to be the fairest employer-employee relationship ever invented. Of course, like democracy, it isn't perfect, but is a hell of a lot more preferable that state-imposed slavery.

In capitalism, an entrepreneur or group of them raises the capital and resources, sets up a for-profit business, and then hires people to grind out the work. The plan is that their efforts will bring in more money than goes out. Depending of the workers' skills and experience, they are paid accordingly. If the economy and the business are running smoothly, the workers will be paid well enough to be able to raise families, buy homes and, to complete the capitalist circle, go out and buy the goods and services produced by their efforts or those of workers in similar free enterprise businesses.

However, for private industry workers in a capitalist state, except for government employees and the military, there is no guarantee of cradle-to-grave employment. For instance, the US steel and auto industry are suffering losses today, and there are extensive job outsourcing affecting many industries. Therefore, at best, US workers could be subject to wage reductions, periods of lay-offs, or at worst, lose their jobs. This is nothing new about the ups and downs of capitalism, because similar situations have happened before, as in the Great Depression of the 1930s. During such times, exploitation complaints and actions by employees against employers often degenerate into strikes and other negative activities. True or not, the word exploitation echoes throughout the labor world.

In this day, where there may be as many as 14 million illegal immigrants in the US, and most of them in the workforce, you can be sure there's considerable exploitation going on against them. The worst examples of exploitation in America, of course, were the centuries when slavery was in force, and a whole race of people was kept in abject slavery and poverty.

If you're familiar with the Great Depression and how American migrant ... not immigrant ... families had to leave their homes and dried-out farms in Oklahoma, Missouri and other states to go to California to find work in the fruit and vegetable fields, you know they were

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