DOI: 10.18848/2324-7576/cgp/a307 ISSN: 2324-7584

Exposing the Elephant in the Room

Mario Marcello Pasco-Dalla-Porta, Levy Del Aguila Marchena, Julio C. Postigo
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Labor exploitation remains a persistent yet underexamined feature of capitalist organizations, increasingly normalized through routine managerial practices under neoliberalism. While scholarship in management and employment relations has largely concentrated on overt and legally prohibited forms of exploitation—such as forced labor, child labor, and human trafficking—less attention has been paid to everyday exploitative dynamics embedded in ordinary firms. Drawing on critical management, business ethics, and employment relations, this study examines labor exploitation in large and medium-sized companies in Peru across three dimensions of employment relations: wages, working time, and workload. Based on fifty-three semi-structured interviews with workers from six industries, the findings reveal both explicit and subtle forms of exploitation. Specifically, the findings identify wage exploitation through inadequate compensation and wage theft, time exploitation through uncompensated overtime and the intrusion into personal life, and workload exploitation through tasks that exceed contractual limits. The study also identifies organizational mechanisms that reproduce and reinforce exploitative conditions, alongside workers’ strategies of resistance. By conceptualizing labor exploitation as a routine organizational phenomenon rather than an exceptional or illegal practice, this study contributes to critical management and employment relations scholarship while offering practical implications for labor regulation, organizational governance, worker well-being, and debates surrounding employment precarity and social inequality.

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