It’s jarring when you see it.

I remember the first time that I was sent with my own paperwork to get signed off. I’d been sub-contracted out before but the office usually dealt with the paperwork. I was paid about $10/hour at the time. The paperwork showed the end-customer was paying not only $100/hour for my services but an extra $14/hour for wear and tear on tools and equipment. They were my fucking tools! And I didn’t get paid a penny extra for wear and tear. My own tools were getting paid more than I was.

At that point I knew I hated employers. I could deal with the shitty hours and managers. A combination of thinking that hard work would make me rich and finding subtle ways to take the piss saw me through that. But the difference between what I made and what I earned. That turned me. I only needed a vocabulary to explain what I already knew.

When I started to read Marx and Marxists almost a decade later, things clicked.