Are you a slave without realising?
Now this article may seem a bit far fetched, but bear with me.
Slavery was abolished many years ago and that’s a good thing. However, personally think a lot of people are still slaves without realising it, trapped by a master and performing tasks to make the masters life better with very little control over their own lives.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a slave as “a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something” and “a person who is the property of another and is forced to obey them”.
Now let’s consider a typical “job”. I would like to suggest to you that the word “employee” could very easily be translated to “slave”.
Whilst an employee may not be the legal property of their employer, the other boundaries as to what makes someone a slave rather than an employee are very blurred. Employees must do what they are told to do, work the hours agreed (i.e. sell their time and effort in exchange for financial reward) and are very often limited to the amount of time they can “take off work”. Does that sound more like a “slave” now? This is where the phrase “a wage slave” comes in.
I’m not saying all jobs are bad or anything like that, I just feel sometimes that employees give too much credit to their employer thinking their employer is doing a great service in offering them the job. In one sense it’s true, but on a grand scale it’s not. No employer gives jobs (except civil servants and charities) for the pure benefit of the employee. Think about it for a moment from an employers perspective. Would it make sense to offer someone a job if it cost more to pay that person than they generated for the business? Of course not.
But you might still argue, “but Paul, my job pays me good money”. Really? How much can an employer pay an employee? An employer can NEVER pay more than the employee generates for a business. That’s why if you have a job you will never be paid what you’re truly “worth”.
How can you earn what you’re worth?
As a self-employed entrepreneur there is no upper limit to your income because you get paid in direct proportion to your work. That’s what I love about being self employed. The fact that I have total freedom. I do not work to make a fortune, I work enough to earn enough to spend time with my family.
If that appeals to you too, then why not start your own business part-time (it needn’t affect your current job) and build it up until you have confidence to go fully self employed too? It’s a fantastic feeling to no longer be a slave!