Looking at the comments, it's hard to pick just one to rebut, but they are pretty much all saying the same thing. I'll just make a comment for the agreeance side of things.
First, the definition of 'exploit' is both positive and negative;
exploit1 - to make productive use of :
utilize exploiting your talents
exploit your opponent's weakness2 - to make use of meanly or unfairly for one's own advantage
exploiting migrant farm
So the way I see it, you can exploit yourself but you'll end up keeping the profits from that. If you know how to make chairs, for example, you can exploit your talents and make a chair yourself, sell it, and keep the profits. The market decides the price based on the demand for the product, not the demand for the labor in this situation. Let's say a chair goes for $100. So by yourself, you make a chair, you get $100. The value of the labor is $100 minus the cost of material.
Now let's say that same person wants to produce twice as many chairs for more profit but doesn't want to do twice the work in the same time because they would become burned out too quickly. That person wants to hire someone to make the second chair. Now we already know that the value of labor is $100 minus costs. This is what the second person should be paid but then the first person won't profit at all from the second chair. So the first person puts out an ad for someone to make him a chair for $80. Eventually, the second person comes along and agrees to be exploited to make the second chair. Whatever the reason that person agreed to enter that contract is irrelevant. Their skills are being exploited because the initial person gets 20% extra from the skill of that second person without doing anything when it's sold for $100.
There are of course other factors involved in this, but the second person is being exploited for the first person's gain. This is true for anyone with a boss. Whether it's a plumber working for a company in North America for $60/hr or someone making Nike shoes in a sweatshop for $0.50 a day. If they weren't being exploited, their boss wouldn't profit from it.
The argument with most of the rebuttals here seems to imply that this exploitation is always bad. It's not necessarily because that is the other side of the market that determines the value of the labor. It's not the buyer who determines the price of the labor, it's the worker who will allow themselves to be exploited for less money, forcing everyone around them to either find something else to do or be exploited for the same amount. If nobody will agree to be exploited to make a chair for $80 then that first person will have to raise the price to the level where someone agrees to be exploited. it could be $81 or $99. It's still exploitation unless the worker gets the full $100 (the complete value of their work).
I would agree with you in a world where there is no capital and the only creator of value is the human labor - in that case anyone working for person one would be stupid. But isn't it that companies dramatically increase the productivity of the workers by providing capital e.g. machines for producing a chair. In that case it's a win-win situation because the workers couldn't produce 10 chairs in an hour themselves.
Good point, but this may fall in with my "other factors" point.
The capital should benefit all who are involved, not just the boss. If the first person had hired the second for $80 a chair and, after a while, bought a machine with the exploited profits (from the second person) to allow the second person to make 10 chairs in the time it normally took to make one, who's money did they really use? The exploited money. Furthermore, in society now, the agreement probably wouldn't have been for $80 a chair, but $80 a day (and it takes 1 day to initially make a chair. There would probably be a quota or something). In today's world, would the second person now get $800 a day with the boss getting an extra $200 a day for doing nothing except supplying the new machine? Or would the second person get a small raise (to $100 a day) to make it seem like they get something, and the boss gets $980 extra a day?
It's most likely the second way. But either way, it all started with somebody being exploited for the boss to have enough capital to expand the business. The boss did take the risk to invest more in the production of chairs so he may be entitled to a bigger chunk of the profits, but the money he used to do that was exploited, initially.