I don't think it is necessarily exploitative, even in the sense you describe. Imagine a world where both person A and person B work 4 hours a day, and clean the

I don't think it is necessarily exploitative, even in the sense you describe. Imagine a world where both person A and person B work 4 hours a day, and clean their own houses 4 hours a day. Person A, due to the nature of his work/skills, produces more per unit time at his job then person B. Both of them could make more money if person A spends 8 hours at his job, person B spends 8 hours cleaning both houses, and they split person B's earnings evenly. Another way of looking at this situation is the marginal value of time. There are 24 hours in a day. Assume you sleep for 8 of them, you have 12 waking hours. At this point, you might be willing to spend a hour cleaning your house. Now, imagine that you spend another 8 hours at work (but have the same amount of total income). In this situation you only have 4 hours of free time. In this case, you would likely be willing to spend more money to keep that free time, because you have less of it. This is also why we often pay more for overtime.