exploit
The film is neither exploitative, nor in bad taste.
This show is shamelessly exploitative trash.
Informal labour relations tend to be more exploitative than those within the legitimate economy.
This is reality television at its exploitative worst.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Treating people or animals badly
a raw dealidiom
abuser
anti-harassment
at the hands of someoneidiom
batten
batten on someone
ill-treat
ill-treatment
ill-used
impose
inflict
prey on something
put someone through something
put upon
reduce
uncared for
use
victimization
victimize
victimology

Examples from literature

Other exploitative human activity based in utilitarianism is not crass or all so obviously wrong, especially in today's context. 
Such exploitative activities have led our species the full length of the road from the Stone Age to the sophisticated and powerful technological civilization of present times. 

Examples of exploitative

exploitative
The trade unions' complaints and demands concentrated on the low wages, the harsh working and living conditions and-of crucial importance-the exploitative kangany-system.
What constitutes respectful engagement with the instrument rather than exploitative appropriation of its design, attributes, sounds and performance techniques?
This way, the search exhibits a form of exploitative behavior.
So had a notion that the production of worsteds was less exploitative than woollens, whose workforce was dependent on wealthy putting-out clothiers.
I also refer briefly to his response to the last objection (that a commercial market in human organs would be exploitative) a little later.
Rampant sexuality created not only unwanted pregnancy, but also dangerous and exploitative conditions for women.
If the resultant behavior is exploitative, the term "deception" is applied.
In some texts, such misgivings are effectively marginalized by the glorification of exploitative commerce.
To fail to respect that theory is to be exploitative.
It seems exploitative, and hence disrespectful, to offer a starving person food in exchange for doing what you like.
The former saw the jobber as a necessary evil, the latter saw the jobber as an exploitative agent.
Rather than protecting groups from potential exploitation in research, exclusion or limited access to trial participation was seen as exploitative, harmful, and unjust.
As pointed out above, however, one could naturally imagine a regulated, presumably less exploitative, version of the market.
This preserved them to some extent from the exploitative impersonality, as many saw it, of market relations.
Markets were branded as capitalist, selfish and exploitative.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.