Also, exempt employees get more and better benefits than non-exempt, although they don't always get more pay. In a lot of businesses, the exempt employees are higher status, so they are easier to manipulate, because upper management always pits them against the non-exempt employees.

In my experience working for over 30 years in both the public and private sectors at various times, many management drones are really gullible when it comes to their own wage slavery. They have so bought into the status thing of being management, that they remain in denial about the ways that upper managment (ie the CEO, CFO, etc) are screwing them over.

Anyone else ever notice that? I mean, look at how many management drones passively watched their jobs get outsourced, their pensions evaporate, and their benefits get cut in the last decade, while the boom was still on in many places.