>The worker has the ability to find another employer whose terms are more agreeable, start their own business and attempt to get people to pay them directly for

>The worker has the ability to find another employer whose terms are more agreeable, start their own business and attempt to get people to pay them directly for a service, or even to exit the labor force entirely. But that doesn't change the relationship except to not begin it, because that is quitting. There remains a structurally subordinate relationship between owner and worker that quitting does not change. >they don't give everyone the level of control and autonomy that you're intimating. That is false. Tens of thousands of Mondragon (for example) co-op worker-owners collectively and democratically decide how, when, where and why to work and have done so successfully for many decades. Workers there face significantly less burnout and I suggest it is specifically because of the fundamental change they made to the working relationship by making everyone more or less the same -- there is no greater than a nine times multiple difference in compensation between highest and lowest paid employee for example, and everybody must arrive with some modest capital in order to work there. This is of course unthinkable under capitalism, which is oriented toward concentrating power and capital in a stockholder and governor/owner class, not vesting these things in the people who create all the value. Speaking of unthinkable, let me observe that as you and I have proceeded, you have edged away from the "real world" you claim to occupy and headed toward an ideological shelter world where what is possible is determined not by existing things but by your certainty that those things don't exist.