> The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages.
The only pretext here is the notion that employment is anything other than a fee-for-service transaction between a supplier and a customer. Ultimately everyone in every employment context is functionally a "standalone small business".
When I see articles like this one that attempt to layer third parties' normative dogma into other people's transactional relationships, the more paranoid part of my mind makes me start thinking about who ultimately benefits from convincing people to view employment as some sort of paternalistic relationship, or to internalize "worker" as a personal identity, conceptualized as something other than "seller of services".
It's amazing to me that the very political factions whose doctrine's "motte" has always been about empowering workers to own their own means of production, set their own work schedules, decide how much or how little to work, etc. are now attacking the closest thing to those ideals that has emerged and proved economically viable in decades.
Perhaps it's precisely because it is a market-based, emergent phenomenon that minimizes the role of activists and political middlemen, whose livelihood comes from getting everyone to treat economics as an adversarial, zero-sum game. So we have people purporting to speak on behalf of gig workers, on their own authority, and contradicting what many gig workers themselves say: that they see themselves as small-scale entrepreneurs, and don't want to be shoehorned into the traditional assumptions of conventional employment in the first place.
It's just amazing to me that the people who pretend the most to be on the side of "workers" always seem to insist that the workers cede their autonomy to someone else, whether regulatory bureaucracies, centralized unions, or employers themselves, and actively seek to undermine workers' own initiatives to participate in the economy on their own terms.
> The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages.
The only pretext here is the notion that employment is anything other than a fee-for-service transaction between a supplier and a customer. Ultimately everyone in every employment context is functionally a "standalone small business".
When I see articles like this one that attempt to layer third parties' normative dogma into other people's transactional relationships, the more paranoid part of my mind makes me start thinking about who ultimately benefits from convincing people to view employment as some sort of paternalistic relationship, or to internalize "worker" as a personal identity, conceptualized as something other than "seller of services".
It's amazing to me that the very political factions whose doctrine's "motte" has always been about empowering workers to own their own means of production, set their own work schedules, decide how much or how little to work, etc. are now attacking the closest thing to those ideals that has emerged and proved economically viable in decades.
Perhaps it's precisely because it is a market-based, emergent phenomenon that minimizes the role of activists and political middlemen, whose livelihood comes from getting everyone to treat economics as an adversarial, zero-sum game. So we have people purporting to speak on behalf of gig workers, on their own authority, and contradicting what many gig workers themselves say: that they see themselves as small-scale entrepreneurs, and don't want to be shoehorned into the traditional assumptions of conventional employment in the first place.
It's just amazing to me that the people who pretend the most to be on the side of "workers" always seem to insist that the workers cede their autonomy to someone else, whether regulatory bureaucracies, centralized unions, or employers themselves, and actively seek to undermine workers' own initiatives to participate in the economy on their own terms.