80% of employees say their workplace is toxic

When it all boils down, you're there doing a job for money because the only way they can get somebody to do it is by paying them. It is a negative thing in your life. That's why you're getting paid to do it.

> It is a negative thing in your life. That's why you're getting paid to do it.

This just isn't automatically the case.

If you have a dream job that fulfills you in every way and is nothing but a positive (I've had three such jobs), you still need to eat, pay bills, etc. So you still need to be paid for it.

How positive or negative the job is doesn't enter into whether or not people need to be paid to do the job.

The fundamental relationship of capitalism, i.e. capital owner employing people to work for him and make him money, is quite toxic. No wonder it seeps into the workplace relationships.

This is exactly right and people want to ignore the fact that unless you play the capitalism game, you basically die.

There are no alternatives

> If you have a dream job

Then you're already too deep the capitalist propaganda... Ignorance is bliss

We can safely assume that at least 80% of people don't have a dream job.

Yep. Toxicity is just built in into foundations of our society and, like you said, at this point there are no alternatives.

Consider it a hypothetical, then, just to explain how it's not true that if a job were perfect, then people would do it without getting paid. It's a simple point: people need an income to live. If a job is perfect in every way but doesn't pay, then nobody could afford to have that job.

Yes, we can, but that doesn't take away from the point I was making.

The biggest problem that I see, is the vagueness of the employer-employee contract. You get hired for a specific job, but in practice employers always demand more and more, and they know they are leveraging the fact that it's hard and/or impractical for most people to switch jobs. They know that employees will do anything they are told because if not someone else will. It's a form of subtle exploitation.

You get hired to work on a small team, but soon enough you have 2x the responsibilities but you only get a small raise. Or you are hired as a technical person but very quickly you are pushed into managing teams and learning the rest of the business. All of this is adds up and it feels like you were hired to do X, but now you are doing XYZ, just because if you don't you lose the job or don't get a small raise.

Capitalism is based largely on coercion. The overwhelming majority of people would not be doing what they do most of the time if their needs were already met.

Probably built into the foundations of life.