SubG posted:

Illustrated in the Deep Space 9 episode "In the Cards" in which an elaborate series of trades is needed to satisfy Sisko's desire for a rare baseball card, the trades arranged in such a way that everyone gets what they want except Leeta, a "dabo girl" working under contract for Quark. She is explicitly not a beneficiary of the Federation's post-scarcity utopia. At one point it is implied that "dabo girls" are expected to do sex work, and in any case the workplace is bad enough that it's a plot point and the workers eventually unionise. So they're not working for personal fulfillment or whatever. Anyway, she had something that was necessary for the sequence of trades and declined to give it up, so it was literally stolen from her. As in the "good guys" burgle it from her room. The end of the episode has some pablum narrated by Sisko about finding happiness in darkness. This is heard over a montage of everyone enjoying what they got out of the trades. In the middle of all of the images of the more privileged people enjoying what they got there's a brief image of Leeta, in apparent emotional distress and searching her room. The montage ends with Sisko, the guy in charge of the station and the one who sets the rules, embracing his son, presumably to warm everyone's hearts because that's what we're supposed to take away from it all.