Profit Sharing Isn’t Sharing

When “Profit Sharing” Is Just a Story We’re Told

There’s a difference between being legally free and actually being free—and that gap is where modern work quietly breaks people.

In the U.S., we’re told that buying stocks, receiving equity, or having a retirement account makes us “partners in prosperity.” But for most workers, that partnership is fictional. Their so-called ownership is tethered to a stock market driven by speculation, algorithms, interest rates, and investor moods—not by the real labor happening on factory floors, in warehouses, hospitals, classrooms, or behind glowing screens at midnight.

Companies announce record profits. Executives cash out stock-based compensation. Shareholders celebrate.

Workers? They budget groceries, skip doctor visits, juggle rent, and carry debt like a second job.

The message says, “You’re an owner.”

The reality says, “You’re an expense.”

What Real Profit Sharing Would Actually Look Like

Real profit sharing isn’t complicated. It’s just inconvenient for people who benefit from the current setup.

Real profit sharing means:

• If profits exceed X, a fixed percentage goes to workers.
• Payouts are real money or secure savings—not volatile stock grants.
• The formula is public, audited, and legally protected.
• It can’t be quietly rewritten in a boardroom when bonuses are on the line.

This isn’t radical. Versions of this already exist in other countries and cooperative models. What’s radical is pretending it’s impossible while executives extract millions from the same profit pools workers are told don’t exist.

When profit sharing is real, it’s not a perk.

It’s not charity.

It’s a right tied to value creation.

Where Exploitation Starts to Look Familiar

Let’s be precise—but let’s also be honest.

This system is not chattel slavery. People are not legally owned or sold. But the *economic logic* echoes uncomfortably close:

• A small class controls land, capital, housing, and credit.
• The majority must sell their time on terms they did not design.
• The surplus flows upward.
• Insecurity flows downward.

Add medical debt. Add housing scarcity. Add student loans. Add the threat of collapse after a single missed paycheck.

At that point, the “freedom to choose” becomes a narrow hallway with locked doors on both sides. You can technically walk away—but only toward hunger, illness, or homelessness.

It isn’t slavery by law.

It functions through managed dependence.

Why Words Matter (Even When They Make People Uncomfortable)

Calling this “pure slavery” expresses real rage—and that rage is earned. But precision gives power.

What we’re dealing with is:

• Wage exploitation
• Debt peonage
• Structural theft of labor’s share

Legal freedom paired with economic captivity

This language doesn’t soften the truth. It sharpens it. It connects the exhaustion people feel to the mechanisms causing it—profit allocation, shareholder primacy, and laws that protect capital before humans.

People aren’t imagining things. They are working harder and falling further behind by design.

Imagining a Different Deal

A different deal would start with one simple rule:

If workers create the surplus, workers automatically claim part of it.

That means:

• Profit sharing as a legal baseline, not a PR strategy.
• Workers treated as stakeholders by default, not liabilities to minimize.
• When companies win big, workers don’t get a pizza party or a thank-you email—they get paid.

This wouldn’t solve everything. Monopolies, racism, political capture, and environmental extraction would still need confrontation. But it would strike at the core illusion holding this system together: the idea that an economy can call itself “free” while keeping most people trapped in survival mode.

That’s the conversation this opens.

And it’s exactly the conversation we’ve been trained not to have.