[runarberg]

Please note that exploitation here is a technical term from marxism and should not be confused with how this word is commonly used in english as a synonym for oppression. In my native language of Icelandic there is a much nicer word arðrán which literally means “dividend burglary”, “profit burglary” or “stealing the fruits of your labor”. It doesn’t matter how much you personally makes, if someone else is taking money that someone else worked for, that is exploitation of labor.

I hope that clears things out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour

[Jensson]

I didn't work for the money others were paid, I was paid the fruits of my labour, others was paid theirs, thinking that I would be worth more than I was paid is just hubris. Then after having worked a few years, getting 25% pay raises every year, I quit and can now easily work on my own projects because I made ridiculous amounts of money.

[runarberg]

You might not feel exploited, and maybe you personally weren’t. But collectively you and your coworkers were, or at the very least, you and your coworkers were used to enable exploitation of other workers—within Google, or through Google’s third parties. The only way a shareholder of Google can make money off of Google without contributing any work is by exploiting people that do the work. In the context of distributing the wealth a company creates, who gets what is a zero sum game. And if shareholders are making money without working for it, it must be through exploitation. And given the power dynamics at play. It is the workers that are exploited. If not Google’s own workers, then the workers of the companies that are Google’s paying customers.

[Jensson]

The Google founders did a lot of work initially. And then, my job was enabled thanks to that work and the investments.

Your point only works if the company is stable and the work is keeping that company running, but Google has expanded exponentially every year, it hasn't reached the stable rent seeking stage yet. All those profits were reinvested in the form of salaries and jobs, if those went to the early workers then I'd never have gotten a job there and I'd have to live with a much much smaller salary. Stable rent seeking businesses are a problem, yes, that is the bad kind, but modern tech is too young for companies to have reached that stage.

So with your model I'd have made less money, that isn't good for me. Your model only works momentarily, when you stop growing the company and suddenly start to pay everything to current workers. But all the future workers whose jobs were enabled by those reinvestments would then be worse off, and I'd be one of those workers since I joined close to two decades after Google was founded. By the time I left there were twice as many people working there, their salaries were paid by the labour done by the previous workers, and Google barely pays profits so far so most of this actually went back to the workers, just future workers and not current ones, that is why I can't say that I deserve more than I got, I paid it forward as thanks for those who made my job possible.

Edit: And about unions, did you know that Google also operates in countries with strong unions? I joined the company in one of those. And you know, Google started paying me much more when I moved from that country to a country where unions weren't strong? How is this possible if those strong unions would make me get more? So apparently unions don't make these jobs pay more, in my experience it is the opposite, they didn't even manage to get my salary up to par with my non union co-workers. Unions mostly cares about the median, they don't care about high end workers that already makes a lot, unions aren't for me.

[nec4b]

With this kind of logic, you could then just as easily say the workers of google are exploiting the shareholder's capital to profit as they didn't bring any of their own with them. Just as soon as things will go bad for google, all the developers will find another jobs and shareholders will be left suffering the losses.