Employee and employer isn’t the only thing in an economy, and competition in other areas is very fruitful for everyone.
As for this area, yes, there’s a pressure to try to exploit workers, but you can’t exploit them too much or they won’t work for you, competitors will steal them, they’ll go off and found their own business, they might even form unions to apply extra pressure on you. There are lots of competing forces here.
Capitalist competition leads to monopoly by its very nature. You can “compete” best by gaining monopoly power and that power is self-sustaining. That power also enables company owners to pay their workers less for more work and will also operate internationally to impose corporate will on entire nations, with those monopolies tying the entire political system to their own interests.
The silver lining is that monopolies lay bare the practicality of central planning, a common goal of socialists in power. The system competes, eliminates its own competition, and still manages to more or less function via its own bureaucracies. Nationalize under socialists and you just cut out the redundant bureaucracies and begin making work respond to social need rather than profits.
Wouldn’t all the problems with a monopoly be 100 times worse when done by the government? You remove any potential for competition, government officials would still act in their own self interests (as they always have and always will), the government maintains their power through military force, there are no laws or legislations to stop them, it’d control everything it possibly could, and any objections are met with legal punishment.
I’m no fan of monopolies, but a totalitarian government (which is what every government strives for) is much worse.
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