“The employee is dead, long live the entrepreneur”
I look forward to the day when a public figure can stand up and announce: ‘we are all self-employed now’ because in a world of self-employed people, the playing field would be level. Not in an absolute sense but in the sense that we would be peers and partners, understanding what it means to have taken responsibility for something. That does not mean that employees cannot feel responsibility for their work and it is not my intention to sow animosity. However, the person who ‘carries’ the balance sheet and who has both to make his own final decisions and bare their consequences, is technically and experientially in a different place from the person who gets told what to do and then takes home wage at the end of each day. The camp-follower can never know what it means to be a guide. Can every human being guide himself, at least as an expectation and an ideal? Or does society ‘work’ because some people need to be told what to do while others are in a position to tell them.
A self-employed person is someone who has chosen their own path and taken responsibility for what they produce or offer to society at large. Is there any reason why this could not be all of us? The advantages would be immediately apparent. A person who manages his own balance sheet has a very direct interest in how to offer the best service. You won’t find a self-employed person shutting up shop just because it is 5pm as the last customer hurries to get to the door, nor do the self-employed take sickies, waste their resources or carry out futile tasks because it is their ‘job’ to do so.
There are two aspects to self-employment. The first is an inner one. It requires initiative to take something on, to feel responsible for it and to maintain it. The other aspect is external - one’s legal status (which is also a tax issue). It is a moot point whether one can be made self-employed ‘from outside’, whether this can cause an inner re-orientation. Let’s imagine it can! Is there any reason why people currently employed by a company cannot change their contracts of employment such that they become contracts not of ‘employment’ but simple agreements between parties. The company would still exist as a contracting entity but the individuals working within it would all be sovereign ‘service-providers’.
The obstacles to self-employment (in law and in tax arrangements) are not insuperable. In the first place they exist largely as a reflection of our culture’s attitude to working independently. Secondly, even as they exist today, laws are the subject of much misconception - the thinking behind the law is that a person is self-employed when he IS self-employed in fact and his working context just reflects this. Unfortunately (and this is a problem across the board with the way the law is casually understood), a common interpretation of self-employment is to see whether the working practice falls within revenue guidelines, a tick-box approach that pays no heed to the spirit of the law.
So let us assume that we can all be self-employed. Outwardly not much will change - we can continue working in our existing roles, but inwardly a complete reorientation will occur. No longer will anyone work for a ‘boss’, everyone will work according to a contract that they themselves devise with their counterparty. The only question will be whether the contract is being fulfilled or not. The energy wasted on complaining about one’s workplace and colleagues will need to find another outlet - as the author of one’s own arrangements it will be harder to point the finger.
The more strongly this image lives, of people organising their own working life, however modest or humdrum, and having the satisfaction of being their own masters, the more one wonders why the prospect faces such resistance. Of course one can argue that society’s resources are already nicely carved up by the vested interests of corporatism, the state-sector, unionised labour and other allied bodies in such a way that the single individual will never be able to make progress without joining up with the big players. Perhaps that is so and perhaps in the long run ideas and imaginations remain what they are while life, without paying them heed, runs its own course.
A self-employed person must stand or fall on his own merits, there is no safety net or place to hide. Because that is so, one quickly comes to realise that the ‘fate’ of the self-employed is not an individual matter but a social one. He depends on recognition from the rest of society to capitalise his activity, commission his work, and pay the true price that will enable him to live by what he does.
The question is whether as a society we value people doing their own thing and working together in free association, or whether we think that a more regimented approach, governed by industrial leaders, is more conducive to productivity, creativity and the social good.
