💡 Independence and Ownership series For the full picture of why leaving employment does not free you from masters — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Why starting a business does not free you from masters
Introduction: Work That Comes to You
Many people remember the day their first job came through after signing up to a brokering platform. Work flows towards you without going out to sell. Whether to take it or decline is yours to choose. There is no manager. Here there really is a latitude of choice that did not exist in employed life.
How to win projects and how to raise your rates are already well documented. What this article takes up is what, when you work on top of such a mechanism, newly comes to stand above you in exchange for the freedom to choose.
Here is the conclusion first. In place of release from a human boss, you are placed under a new administrator called the rating. And this administrator is, in a certain sense, far tougher than the old boss — because there is nobody there to whom you can explain your circumstances.
📖 Contents
A Convenient Mechanism Is Also a New Master
Services that broker work, places where skills are bought and sold, places where finished goods are listed. Such mechanisms cut the labour of finding customers, mediate the transaction, and even take on collecting payment. At a glance they are convenient contrivances that lighten the independent person’s load.
Yet working through such mechanisms places a person under a new kind of master. That master is the mechanism itself. It takes a fee, decides the order of display, and operates the rating device. How you are handled on top of it is, in most cases, determined by a rating score or a ranking. Gather good ratings and you are displayed higher and obtain more work. Take low ratings and you sink, and the work dries up. This rating device governs a living quietly, but strongly.
A Rating Score Does the Same Job as a Boss
Look hard at how a rating score works and you notice it plays a role strikingly similar to the old boss.
A manager evaluated a subordinate’s work, and that evaluation governed promotion, pay and the allocation of tasks. A rating score evaluates work, and that evaluation governs display order, volume of work and fees. The role is the same. In place of release from a boss, the independent person is placed under a new evaluator called the rating score.
And this new evaluator is, in a certain sense, far tougher than the old boss. With a boss you could explain your circumstances, negotiate, build a relationship. A rating score has nobody there to explain circumstances to. In most cases it is computed unilaterally by a mechanical device.
Contemporary sociology of work has studied this phenomenon head-on. In work mediated by brokering mechanisms, workers are placed under management not by human administrators but by automated devices; the allocation of work, the evaluation and the pay are all decided automatically by the device rather than by human judgement [Vallas & Schor, 2020; Wood et al., 2019]. Researchers analyse this as a new form of control over labour.
Let me be clear here. This is not a denunciation of any particular service or operator. Many individual mechanisms really do lighten the independent person’s load. What is being looked at is the nature of the management that the brokering form generates structurally.
Bending Yourself to Protect a Rating
The actual change this structure brings shows up inside everyday exchanges.
Fearing a low rating, you accept an unreasonable demand you should properly decline. You swallow a legitimate point you should properly make. The behaviour you adopt to protect a rating is precisely the compliant behaviour an employee adopts towards a manager. Employed by nobody, and yet endlessly reading the face of an invisible boss called the rating.
The gap between the sense of having become free through independence and this compliant behaviour goes unnoticed for a while, because this new boss, being invisible, is hard to recognise as a boss. But the fact that you bend yourself out of concern for a rating shows plainly that you remain under management.
▸ Why increasing the number of clients does not reduce dependence itself is taken up in escaping subcontracting does not end your dependence.
The Fragility of the Story of “Release from the Boss”
What comes into view here is the fragility of the story that independence is release from the boss.
In place of the human boss lost, a new boss called the rating has been gained. The administrator changing from human to device did not make people free; if anything it placed them under a more impersonal management with no room to negotiate. Only the face of the boss changed, from a person to a device; the structure of being managed did not disappear with independence.
The freedom to pick projects is real. But it is the freedom to choose which work to accept, not the freedom of decisions about production — deciding, in the end, what gets made and what it sells for. The range you may choose from lies inside the options the mechanism has prepared.
Conclusion: Separate the Freedom to Choose from the Freedom to Decide
That the exhaustion does not ease however many projects you take is not because you are bad at selling, nor because you have not gathered enough ratings. It is because you have obtained the freedom to choose while the freedom to decide — placing what gets made and what it sells for, in the end, on your own side — is not yet in your hands.
What is needed is to swap the question. Not “how do I win better projects?” but “on top of this mechanism, who is finally putting a price on my work?” Looking at the same days, the direction you move next changes depending on whether you see it as a problem of your own sales ability or as a structure of management.
The whole picture is gathered in why starting a business does not free you from masters.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Vallas, S., & Schor, J. B. “What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy” Annual Review of Sociology, 46 (2020)
- Wood, A. J., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., & Hjorth, I. “Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy” Work, Employment and Society, 33(1) (2019)
- Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
