Exploitation or Cooperation?

In "The Range of Rhetoric," the first chapter from A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke writes:

Here is a major reason why rhetoric, according to Aristotle, "proves opposites."  When two men collaborate in an enterprise to which they contribute different kinds of services and from which they derive different amounts and kinds of profit, who is to say, once and for all, just where "cooperation" ends and one partner's "exploitation" of the other begins?  The wavering line between the two cannot be "scientifically" identified; rival rhetoricians can draw it at different places, and their persuasiveness varies with the resources each has at his command. (Burke, 25).

I think this is really interesting in relation to Nickel and Dimed.  Ehrenreich makes a distinction between the workers and the managers, and she suggests that exploitation is really occurring even though the managers frame it as cooperation by calling the workers "partners" in the company.  I'd like to look into this more.