 This suggests one final possible distribuendum that could be paired with an egalitarian distributive criterion. Perhaps what makes an exchange is fair is not that the objects traded have equal economic value, but rather an exchange is fair when the social surplus created by the exchange is equally distributed. Exploitative exchanges, in contrast, are those in which one party commands a disproportionately large share of the social surplus, leaving the other party with an unfairly small share. For example, suppose that an employer gains $10 per hour worth of value from an employee’s labor. An employer like that could afford to pay its workers $9 per hour and still make a profit. But if potential employees have nowhere else to go, why should the employer pay that much? Why not pay employees as little as she can get away with—maybe $3 an hour, just barely over the subsistence level of $2? In this case the employment relationship would generate a social surplus of $8. But $7 of that surplus would go into the pocket of the employer, while only $1 goes to the laborer. Might not that lopsided division of the social surplus be precisely what’s unfair, and thus exploitative, about this kind of labor?