Most people think of relationships in terms of romance. That’s human. Yet the relationships that have the worst impact on your life aren’t usually romantic ones. They’re one-sided business relationships.
Their hidden costs don’t get much attention, which is why I’m happy to link here to a proactive non-profit running a public conversation about relationship imbalance.
Why Companies Are Worse Than Partners
A bad marriage ruins your home life, a toxic friendship can wreck your social circle—but neither holds a candle to what the wrong company will do to your career and finances. That’s not because companies are inherently worse than romantic or social partners. It’s just that they often are worse, for one reason: earnings asymmetry.
What Is Earnings Asymmetry?
Simply put, it’s when one side gets paid much more for the same effort. Consider hiring a brand consultant: in practice, they get paid on an hourly rate while you deliver free labor as a “follow-up-proof-of-concept” before you even sign any contract. The inequality isn’t necessarily due to shady business ethics or unconscious bias. It’s just what happens when supply and demand meet.
This effects all kinds of hiring practice from legal consulting to website design or cleaning services. You could even say it affects higher-ed admissions as well, although since that isn’t a buying transaction nobody really discusses it like one. That’s why both vulnerable applicants and desperate employers often wind up paying exorbitant prices just to access each other.
How to Tell If Your Company Is Exploiting Asymmetry
The risks are greatest for people making the transition from sample work to self-employment, so let’s pretend you’re just setting out in your career. How can you know if asymmetry is stacked against you? Look for these characteristics:
- Avoids direct communication with anything but short generic text
- Demands adjustments after everything is already done but refuses changes on company standards
- Awards credit to internal team members while blaming mistakes on outsiders
- Gets hot under the collar if you quote them anything without waivers
- Tries—or stops trying—to hide late payments
Until Society Fixes This Problem, You’re On Your Own
The closest thing governments permit companies to run with any legal protection against false claims is affinity groups (nonprofits). Other countries have slightly different rules about exactly where this boundary falls between formal lobbying groups and professional industry associations. In most places, though, there aren’t any clear boundaries at all between those two categories nor between those organizations and consumer collective-bargaining organizations.
The legal loopholes around this mess are pretty predictable: casting unions can find ways around Minimum Wage laws by claiming self-employment status as model-actors, but professional athletes aren’t allowed to collectively bargain over their own contracts once they actually get to work in their field. When entertainment work means things like talking about products from space or public dances with animatronic characters—those won’t be called work at all if workers don’t win court cases every few years reminding agencies how their own rules actually work.
The poorest category of workers overall gets almost no protection at all—it doesn’t matter whether they get paid hourly or by-oldsfold rates either way unless we’re talking thousands of dollars per transaction rather than cents per hour through some referral program during “off-hours”. These independent contractors include everyone from roofers running drywall crews for construction firms down through babysitters taking care of kids.
- Avoids direct communication with anything but short generic text
How Does Rampant Asymmetry Affect Human Evolution?