I was going to say the same thing but you beat me to it. Without some form of profit sharing or stake holding by employees, there is simply no way to make the workplace fair. That fairness was traditionally sought by unions but they have lost much of their influence for political reasons because of their relationship with socialism. Richard Wolff has talked at length about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc
http://www.democracyatwork.info/
Thom Hartmann's programs are another good source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWUI-94b3iI
https://www.thomhartmann.com/
Socialism gets a bad rap in the US because it has been abused in the past to give rise to things like fascism and communism. But many social democracies (much of Europe) today enjoy high standards of living and I would argue are focused more on culture and the pursuit of non-material goals than the US.
We're at a crossroads where the middle class is on the brink of failure due to decades of trickle down economics (Reaganomics). Things like the upcoming tax cut will likely lead to stagflation (high inflation and flat wages, last felt in the 1970s) because there is no mathematical or economic basis for lowering taxes in boom times under a high national debt. So this will be the third bust I've seen (the dot bomb and housing bomb being the others) since the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. Keep in mind that we had almost 70 years of relative stability since it was implemented:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla...
The current trends are towards maximizing concentration of wealth, not just in the US but under multinational corporations. Think of boom-bust cycles as being similar to stock market volatility. The most money is made when prices fluctuate the most, so elected officials are under tremendous lobbying pressure to maximize these peaks and troughs. Meanwhile the working class feels the brunt of the effect, worst for people who have no savings or investments and find themselves overworked/underpaid during boom times and unemployed during down times. They have no investments so miss out on the share of profits made by the wealthy (in effect, a poverty tax).
I’ve tried not to politicize this too much but there are very basic left-right divides at work here and I was born in 1977 so have only witnessed conservative economic policies (Clinton and Obama mostly maintained them, there have been no top marginal rate hikes to pre-Reagan levels of perhaps 50-75%). Incomes flatlined sometime around 1980 and in very real terms, workers today are earning roughly half what the baby boomers earned, adjusted for inflation:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Productivity_and_Rea...
This is probably due to several reasons, a main one being that more women work outside the home today so there was a doubling of the labor pool which put downward pressure on wages. But that’s not enough to explain it entirely. I put the blame squarely on regressive tax policies, for example the separation of income and capital gains tax (so-called earned and unearned income). Net income should probably all be taxed the same way, under a fair tax bracket scheme, preferably a mathematical curve of some kind:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/simplest-suitably-progressive-...
A flat tax is far too regressive, but something approaching linear on a logarithmic scale could work.
What this all means is that it's going to be up to us to work towards some form of progressive taxation or dreaming into the future far enough, a universal basic income like Star Trek. That may require taxing robot labor or coming up with new forms of taxation like putting sales tax on stock trades. If we educate ourselves in things like civics which are no longer taught in school, we can get a picture of what it was like when the US was more democratic and able to change its course. So to answer the original poster’s question: too many hours, too little pay, and to add insult to injury: no self-determination (freedom) in the workplace.
But I think if everyone knew the history of how we got here, it would no longer be ethical to exclude workers from reaping the fruits of their labors via the distinction of employer and employee. And I think that with full access to information, we arrive at the conclusion that progressive taxation is the quickest and most proven way to create a middle class. I don’t think of these things as socialism but that label is used to discredit otherwise logical conclusions in socioeconomics.
