The lowest paid workers are subject to coercion, and Sports Direct is a good example, and more so, that coercion is contagious. When unemployment is high, the middle classes, and the professional classes, can find themselves facing adverse conditions. Consider, nowadays, for many computer engineers, if they want to find interesting work, they often try to work at startups. The management of startups often emphasize "fun" aspects of work such as ping pong tables, arcade games, free pizza and sometimes free beer. These ephemeral aspects of fun are meant to distract from 70 hour work weeks and stressful deadlines. And the funding for startups is uncertain. A great recent first-person article that illustrates the kind of coercive management one can run into at a startup was "What happens when the Board Of Directors begins to panic". This is very long, but it gets surprisingly dramatic at the end: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-happens-when-the-board-of-directors-begins-to-panic