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The whole thing is founded on mutual consent.
First, let's consider a small company started by one person, or a small group of people. They rightfully own all of the physical and intellectual property of the company, because it literally is their physical property that they pay out of their own pockets, and their labor that they use to increase it. There isn't much meaningful distinction, it's not conflation, it's literally their physical assets, they just use a technical legal ritual to officially make it a "company" for tax and liability purposes. If they hire an employee, they sign a contract with the employee that, in exchange for such and such labor and duties, the employee gets such and such wages and/or shares in the company. And the owners and employee can come up with whatever split of the profits they both find mutually agreeable. Like any purchase or sale of any other good, if one of the parties doesn't think it's fair they can opt out, the only difference is that the thing being bought is "labor".
For larger companies, not much changes, it's just that the owners are people who have purchased shares in the company, which represents a fraction of the physical and intellectual property of the company. That is, if I buy 1/1000000 of a company, then by all rights I own 1/1000000 of all of its physical assets in a moral sense as if they were my private property. There are nuances and legal distinctions, but ethically it's the same as if I bought some physical capital and hired someone to use it to produce stuff for me to sell. And the mutually consensual agreements to purchase labor are between employees and the collective shareholders who own the company assets. Yes, labor is an absolutely necessary ingredient in whatever process the company uses to convert labor into material goods, but fish is a necessary ingredient for a sushi chef to make sushi, there's no reason a priori that the corporate employee is owed anything different than what their contract states for selling their labor that the fisherman is not for selling their fish just because one is officially an "employee" of the corporation and the other is not, since the fisherman doesn't technically work for the restaurant they sell to.
Corporations are fancy coordination mechanisms that convert labor and goods into better goods that are worth more than the sum of the inputs combined. Thus the coordination mechanism itself creates value. If it weren't the case then skilled laborers would simply create the same wealth without signing an employee contract with any corporations, and thus would outcompete them by having less overhead, and could pay themselves better wages. And some people do this. But economy of scale is a thing, and investments are a thing, and they help create value. In theory, again there are a ton of exceptions and counterexamples.
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