Exploited why

Due to this unfairness, exploitation is a highly emotive concept, involving value judgments from different perspectives. In order to comprehend exploitation in sociological terms, it needs to be considered in this relational manner: understanding who is being exploited, why, and by whom. Throughout this entry, the key themes of exploitation will be discussed, including harmful or mutually beneficial exploitation, the role of paid and unpaid work, key theorists like Marx, and recent developments with digital technology.

Exploitation can also refer to the use of natural resources — for example, exploiting a mineral deposit through mining. For example, a single employment relationship may be exploitative in a transactional sense if it were taking advantage of a worker, either through paying low wages or breaking employment law. However, the exploitation could be structural if particular groups are able to take advantage of others through the unfair organization of a system Sample, These understandings of exploitation — that is, the taking advantage of something — might appear to be obviously negative in a normative sense.

However, exploitative relationships can either leave the exploited party as harmed or involve some form of benefit as well. Much early writing on exploitation focused on the relationship with trade.

For example, St. This question focused on the choices of individuals within discrete transactions. These questions of exploitation are later developed in the nineteenth century in the context of employment relationships.

The idea began to emerge that labor was the source of all economic value since without that labor other commodities could not be produced. For classical liberal thinkers, like Locke or Hodgskin, this is connected to rights over private property.

Across both relationships, one party is able to gain by taking something at the expense of the other. The basis for both of these relationships is the creation of rights of property, enforced by the state and violence, that suppress what otherwise would be natural rights. Theories of exploitation have been deeply shaped by Karl Marx. These struggles were between the exploiters and exploited, reaching a pinnacle under capitalism.

In the simplest terms, Marx's theory of exploitation stems from the relationship of capitalist work: that workers are paid less for their labor by the capitalist than the value they produce.

For Marx, the work relationship under capitalism was therefore fundamentally exploitative. Workers are free to choose who to work for — unlike regimes of unfree labor like slavery — but simultaneously free from any other means of surviving than by working.

For example, factory workers sell their time to a factory owner who then puts them to work on the machinery they own. In the simplest terms, the factory owner employs workers to produce more than it costs to employ them — otherwise they could not make money. Labor therefore produces surplus value — value beyond that which workers are paid — which is expropriated as profit by capitalists. Regardless of which perspective is taken, paid work is clearly an important site of exploitation.

However, there is a difference in understanding the extent of it or why it happens. It is a complex and hidden issue. People who are being exploited can find themselves in situations where they experience abuse and violence, and may be forced to take part in criminal activities. Exploitation can happen anywhere, including in Devon where increasing numbers of vulnerable children and adults are being identified as victims.

It takes place in urban and rural areas and affects people of all ages, genders and ethnicities. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in exploitation as a moral concept, as well as to those who have abandoned the concept of exploitation as fundmentally confused or unhelpful.

After reading this book, the latter group may need to change their minds. Sample's hypothetical examples are interesting and, to this reviewer's intuition, her conclusions are right. It is capable of forcing anyone who reads it to rethink his established notions about what exploitation involves and what makes it wrong.