From Empowerment to Exploitation: How Companies and Culture Exploit the Word | Oped
When Empowerment Becomes Exploitation
Photo Credit: pixelfit via iStockPhoto.com
By: Jamila Gomez
Empowerment is everywhere. Companies claim they empower employees. Brands promise their products empower women. The word saturates ad campaigns, annual reports, and hashtags. But the more it circulates, the more hollow it becomes. Too often, what’s sold as empowerment is exploitation dressed in affirmations—demanding more while insisting you should be grateful for the chance.
The workplace is the clearest case. Employers boast about empowering staff with “flexibility” or encouraging “ownership.” In practice, flexibility means being reachable at all hours, and ownership translates into absorbing responsibilities without pay, support, or decision-making power. You’re told you’re being empowered to grow while your job quietly expands into what used to be two jobs. Autonomy becomes a brand name for overwork.
Consumer culture runs the same play. A fashion label celebrates “empowered women” in glossy ads while underpaying women of color who sew its garments under unsafe conditions. Wellness companies sell supplements, apps, and retreats as tools for empowerment, telling you peace is a purchase away. The burden lands on individuals to buy, optimize, and “fix” themselves, while the forces driving their stress—precarious wages, long hours, unaffordable housing—stay untouched.
The gig economy perfected the script. Platforms talk about empowering workers to “be their own boss,” but what many actually get is fluctuating pay, opaque algorithms, and the risks of employment without protections. The freedom to choose your hours often means stitching together income across multiple apps with no benefits. Again, the language elevates choice while the structure limits it.
This rhetoric doesn’t merely mislead; it relocates accountability. If you don’t feel empowered, the diagnosis becomes personal: you didn’t lean in, hustle harder, manifest correctly, or maintain the right mindset. Structural barriers fade from view, shielded by uplifting copy. Meanwhile, the people with the least control over their time and safety are told to self-improve their way out of systems designed to exhaust them.
Real empowerment is not a slogan. It is structural. It looks like fair wages, predictable schedules, safe workplaces, paid leave, and accessible healthcare. It means transparent advancement, independent recourse for harm, and a voice with teeth—unions, worker councils, tenant protections.
We should retire the applause lines and adopt testable questions: Who decides? Who benefits? Who bears the risk? How quickly can harm be remedied, and by whom? If the answers still point up the chain, that’s not empowerment—it’s marketing. Power that can be taken away without due process or a collective say was never power to begin with.
If institutions are serious, they should stop using empowerment as camouflage and ask harder questions: Are we shifting control to the people most affected, or simply rebranding extraction? Until “empowerment” is tied to actual power—time you can protect, money you can live on, safety you can trust—it will remain a flattering mask.
And masks, no matter how inspirational the slogan across them, cannot clean the air we’re forced to breathe. Real empowerment changes the air. Everything else is costume.
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