Ummm... OK.
Actually if you're running a business, you preserve it by treating employees, including yourself as the owner, as "a thing." The reason for this is that the market couldn't care less about your soul. The cold, hard facts of business dictate how much you can pay for a given level of labor. No business can afford to overpay employees for ever. Unions have done their darndest to make this happen for years, but it catches up with them sooner or later.
Free-marketers are, perhaps, athiests, but that's only because business knows no God. Its life-blood is money; that's all that will keep it alive.
Market is a concept, a convention behind which the real people hide. See my tagline.