Reading the Wish Not to Be Employed Through What the Contract of Employment Exchanges

You do not want to be employed. That is not the same as disliking work. Given work you chose yourself you can stay inside it for hours, and you have no wish to do a commissioned job carelessly either. Put the two side by side in conversation and it stops fitting together, so it goes unsaid.

Say it aloud and the reply that tends to come back is so what will you earn from? There is no ill will in it; they are worrying about your living. But at the moment the discussion moves to earning, the original sense is left behind, because what you earn from and whether you are employed are separate questions.

Let me take out what is being left behind. What the phrase I do not want to be employed refuses is not labour. Nor is it the amount of money. It is the third item among what the contract of employment exchanges, the one that is neither time nor money — handing over a range of compliance in advance.

This third item has one property the other two do not. It is not written in the contract. Unlike an amount or a span of hours it has no outline drawn around it, so its actual width is settled in the practice that follows the contract.

For that reason the sense cannot be explained from the side of terms and conditions. The better the conditions of the workplace, the harder the reason becomes to see — for the person holding it and for those around them alike.

Where what is being refused sits also divides good advice from bad. Advice on how to get outside employment exists in quantity, and much of it is practically accurate. What it answers, though, is how to get out, not whether the third item disappears once you are out. Those are separate questions. Carry out the former without answering the latter, and the result can be that the name on the contract changes while the contents stay as they were.

The stage taken up here is the one at which nothing has been decided. There is no plan to resign, and no preparation for independence under way. Only this sense, which has not gone for years. At this stage, collecting options does not advance the judgement, because with no name attached to what is being refused there is no axis on which to compare what has been collected.

What follows fixes this third item from the side of economics, and shows that it is settled not by the kind of contract but by the degree of dependence. Then it sets out a way of counting where you currently stand without cutting the contract. Whether to resign is not judged here. Knowing the position and deciding whether to move it are separate pieces of work.

The Only Thing the List Has in Common Is the Absence of an Employment Contract

Search for do not want to be employed and what comes up is a list of occupations. Freelancing, starting a company, investing, running a shop, joining a franchise, streaming, reselling. They come numbered: ten of them, twelve of them.

And the writers are often on the side of selling a business. Publications gathering franchise applicants, the operators of courses, agencies brokering work. So under the list there is sometimes an entrance to something.

This is not something to condemn. An article written as a business having an entrance to that business is only to be expected.

The lists do share one feature, though. What is set out is a set of occupations whose only common property is not having a contract of employment.

Consider joining a franchise. There is no contract of employment. The goods handled, though, are decided by head office. The prices are decided by head office. Opening hours, fittings and suppliers are in most cases specified. Cut the contract and the business stops.

The same for a freelancer working through an agency. There is no contract of employment. The rate, though, is settled by the agency’s going rate, the content of the job is decided by the commissioner, and the hours are matched to the site.

So the list gathers things whose contracts have different names, and does not look at whether what is being refused changes.

And under the list there is sometimes the same piece of advice: first build up funds while you are still employed. This too is practically correct and does not answer the question. The quantity of funds has nothing to do with what is being refused.

The territory the list does not handle also comes into view here. What is the wish not to be employed refusing? Choose an occupation without knowing that, and the probability of drawing an option in which the object of refusal remains is high.

One further property of the lists. The order is settled by ease of starting. For the reader this is a kindness, and the ordering has a side effect.

An option that is easy to start is one requiring little setting up. And little setting up is partly because the framework has been prepared by someone else. Join and the goods and the sign are already there. Register with an agency and jobs come round. Being prepared, starting is fast.

Having been prepared also means that someone else did the deciding. So the relation is that the higher an option’s ease of starting, the more of what is being refused remains in it. The ordering is unaware of this direction.

So reading the list from the top brings into view, first, the options in which much of the object of refusal remains. Nobody intended it. The criterion for sorting simply happens to have that direction.

What the Contract of Employment Actually Exchanges

What a contract of employment exchanges is not only time and money. A third item is included, and it does not appear on the face of the contract.

On the general understanding it is an exchange of time and money. Hand over fixed hours, receive a fixed amount.

There is something this understanding cannot explain, however: that at the moment of contracting, what will be done is not settled.

In a contract of sale, what is sold and for how much is fixed at contracting. In a contract for work, what is to be completed is fixed. In a contract of employment, only the hours and the amount are fixed, and what will be done in those hours is not. The deciding is done afterwards by the employing side.

The economist Herbert Simon formalised this point in 1951 as the essence of the employment relation (Simon, 1951, Econometrica, 19(3), 293–305). What is sold in a contract of employment is not labour itself but a zone of acceptance — that within a range specified by the other party, the content they specify will be complied with.

Why this form is chosen follows from the same account. At the moment of contracting, what will be needed is not yet known. Try to write out in advance something not yet known, and either it cannot be written out or the arrangement can be used only within what was written. So the column for content is left blank, and the range of compliance is settled first instead.

From here the outline of the contract of employment appears. It is a contract in which a range of compliance is handed over in advance so that the content can be decided later. Being able to leave the column blank is the efficiency; the range handed over is the consideration.

What matters here is that this is not an account of exploitation. Leaving it blank has a rationality to it. If each morning began with negotiating that day’s duties, the day would end in negotiation. The efficiency obtained by handing it over is real.

The cases that do not fit are worth setting out. Contracts in which the scope of the job is written finely at the point of contracting — the duties specified in a document, with nothing outside them required as a rule — do exist. In those the blank is smaller.

A smaller blank, though, also means less room to decide later. If what is needed changes, the contract itself has to be made again. So a contract with an explicit range sits on the side that is more easily cut short than one with a wide range. The size of the blank and the length of the relation are two faces of one design.

So creating the blank is not itself a problem. The rationality of creating the blank, and the consideration paid for it, are received on both sides. What stops fitting together begins at the next single point: that the size of the blank is written down by nobody.

What Is Not Written in the Contract Widens Through Practice

The size of the range handed over is not written in the contract. The hours are written. The amount is written. Only the width of the range of compliance is written nowhere.

Who decides matters that are not written? That question is itself a subject within economics. Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart in 1986 redefined ownership as the right to decide over matters not written in the contract (Grossman & Hart, 1986, Journal of Political Economy, 94(4), 691–719). However finely the clauses are drawn, matters that cannot be written out always remain. Who decides what remains is what settles the substance of the relation — that is the account.

Applied to the contract of employment, the position becomes clear. What is written is the hours and the amount; what is not written is the outline of the range. And the outline is decided by the side it was handed to.

This asymmetry shows in the details of daily life. When work outside your remit comes round, the criterion for judging whether it is inside or outside the range is written nowhere. Not being written, declining makes you narrow in your reading of the remit, and accepting widens the range in substance. Decline or accept, the outline of the range is updated on the other side.

The same happens on the side of time. Working hours are written; whether to respond to contact outside them is not. Respond and the range extends; do not and it becomes an evaluation of attitude.

So the range handed over is not a fixed quantity but a quantity that moves through practice. And the direction of movement is biased. Narrowing requires a procedure; widening requires none. It takes the shape of quiet widening in the course of daily practice.

There is a natural objection here. If it is not written, could you not simply decline?

In form, you can. Room remains to decline work not agreed to. What remains as well, though, is an asymmetry: the declining side is required to judge on every occasion, and the side that handed the range over does not have to judge at all. For each instance, produce a reason, estimate the effect on the relation, then decline. That effort does not arise for the side that complies. The same right can exist while the cost of exercising it falls on one side only. And a right that costs something to exercise goes unused as time passes.

That the sense of not wanting to be employed can strengthen with the years is explained by this. It is not that the work became disliked. The range handed over has genuinely widened.

What Is Refused Is the Zone of Acceptance

Seen through the three items, the position of the sense becomes visible.

What is refused is not time. If handing over time were itself the objection, nothing at all would be wanted. Yet people holding this sense pour long hours into work they chose themselves.

What is refused is not the amount of money either. Dissatisfaction with an amount comes out in the form I want more, not in the form I do not want to be employed.

What is refused is the third item. Handing over a range of compliance in advance. And handing it over with the size of the range unfixed.

This rereading changes the explanatory power of the sense considerably.

There is, for instance, the experience of waiting time being unusually draining. No work is being done and it tires. A day with no instructions arriving is heavier than a busy one. Take the state of having handed over a zone of acceptance to be continuing even when no instruction arrives, and this experience explains itself naturally. The state of having handed it over is itself the load.

The experience of moving to a workplace with wide discretion and the sense not going also occurs. The same framework explains it. Wide discretion means being able to move freely inside the range handed over; it does not mean deciding the range yourself. What decides the width of the range is still the other party.

And the possibility of that range being narrowed tomorrow is not excluded by the contract. Actual narrowing may be rare, and the state of its not being excluded is itself the object of this sense.

Third. The state of having a good superior and still wanting to leave is explicable in the same framework. A good superior is someone who uses the range handed to them with restraint. While it is used with restraint, the load is small.

The restraint, however, is their judgement and not a right you hold. Change the superior and the practice changes under the same contract. So a period under a good superior is not a period in which the structure improved but a period in which the structure was operated gently.

This is separate from the question of whether to be grateful. It is genuinely easier, and that ease is a fact. That ease, though, accumulates nothing on your side. It is of a kind that vanishes with one transfer notice.

And an attempt to put this instability into words tends to be processed as a luxury of a complaint, since it sounds like dissatisfaction expressed about a fortunate state. What is being reported, however, is not about the terms but about whose discretion settles the terms.

What “I Do Not Want to Be Employed” Points At Is Offset from “I Do Not Want to Work”

From outside these two look the same. Both are statements of wanting away from the present way of working.

Their contents, though, can face opposite ways.

I do not want to work is often a reaction to volume or wear. Rest can work on it, and it can go when conditions improve.

I do not want to be employed does not go with improved conditions. It remains after a rise in pay, more holiday, a change of superior. What is improving is inside the range handed over. The structure of having handed over a range does not change through improvement.

So confusing the two makes the response miss. Handle I do not want to be employed as I do not want to work and the prescription becomes rest and adjustment of environment. Neither works. When they do not, the next diagnosis is you are being spoilt.

The confusion runs the other way too. Handle I do not want to work as I do not want to be employed and the prescription becomes independence. Where wear was the cause, wear increases after independence, so the state worsens.

There is one question that distinguishes them. If the content of your present work stayed exactly as it is, and you were free to decide everything about what is done and in what order, would the sense go?

If it would go, what is being refused is the zone of acceptance. If it would not, what is being refused is the content or the volume of the work.

The question contains no amount and no holidays. It is an imagining in which only the location of the right to decide has changed. And a clear answer to it tends to come readily.

The two can also hold at once. The volume is excessive and the zone of acceptance is wide. This combination is not rare. If anything, worsening in one readily worsens the other, because the wider the range, the more work there is that cannot be declined.

Here which is worked on first changes the result. Work on volume and it lightens temporarily, and the range being still wide, it tends to return. Work on the range and volume tends to fall too, because declining becomes possible.

So in sequence the range sits upstream. Volume is a variable that moves as a result.

This order needs a caution, though. Negotiating a narrower range seldom holds inside employment, because the range is not made explicit and so the object of negotiation cannot be defined. To say this is outside the range, the range has to be written. Where it is not, the party asserting it is at a disadvantage.

What Makes the Zone Is Not the Contract but the Relation

Stop the contract of employment and does the zone of acceptance disappear? It does not. The same structure holds outside the contract too.

Look at moving into client work after going independent. The contract becomes one for services and the relation of direction formally disappears. In practice, though, it tends to come out like this.

The content of the work is decided by them. If the specification changes, it is complied with. Meeting times are matched to their convenience. Requests for revision after delivery are met. The contract does not say comply, and whether the next commission comes functions as a de facto right of instruction.

And the protections that came with the contract of employment have been removed. Procedures for when the range is narrowed, and compensation for being cut mid-way, are as a rule absent.

So in this form it can happen that the zone of acceptance remains while the stability that came as its consideration has decreased.

There is another form of the same independence: making something first and leaving it in place. What to make is decided by you, when to put it out is decided by you, and the figure is decided by you. The receiving side can choose whether to buy and holds no right of instruction over the content.

These two are called by the same word, independence. Their effect on the item being refused, however, is exactly opposite.

So the judgement I do not want to be employed, therefore I will go independent is not sufficient on its own. Inside independence there are both a form in which the zone of acceptance remains and a form in which it does not. Without settling the form, only the name on the contract changes and the contents are left as they were.

They can be told apart. Look at what remains to hand when that relation ends.

In commissioned production, what is delivered becomes theirs. The name remains as a credit, and the thing handed over is not to hand. End the relation and the income from it goes to zero.

In the form of making first and leaving it in place, what was made remains to hand. Even if the buyer moves on, what was placed stays placed. Room remains for the next person.

This difference connects directly to the zone of acceptance. While making things that do not remain to hand, whether the next commission arrives goes on telling continuously. While it tells, the de facto right of instruction is theirs. The more that remains to hand, the lower the dependence on the next commission, and the thinner the effect of that right.

So the zone of acceptance is settled not by the clauses of a contract but by the degree of dependence. Rewrite the contract and if the dependence is the same, the zone is the same.

The latter form, though, does not become income from the start. It begins from a state of nothing placed, so until what is placed reaches someone, income is zero. So the latter is laid over the former while the former continues. This period proceeds with the zone of acceptance still handed over.

Seen Through Three Rights of Decision, the Forms Divide

Let me look more finely. The zone of acceptance can be broken into three rights of decision.

First, the right to decide what is done. Second, the right to decide how it is done. Third, the right to judge whether what was made is good.

In employment all three sit on the other party’s side. The second, though, is sometimes partly returned as discretion.

In client work the first and third sit with them and the second with you. What to make is settled by the commission, whether it is good by acceptance testing. How to make it is left to you.

In the form of making first and leaving it in place, all three sit with you. The third needs a note, however. The fact of not having been bought comes back. It is not a judgement, and it is not information that can be ignored either. A judgement and a response differ, and a response of zero does show at least that something has missed.

There is a fourth position: the form of teaching. Content you decided, to a settled counterparty, in settled hours. The first and third sit with you, and in requiring your time on each occasion of handing over, it retains the same property as commissioned production.

What this fourth shows is that the location of the right to decide and the constraint on time are separate axes. With all the rights to decide to hand, if the handing over is one to one, time is constrained. Conversely, with the rights on the other side, if what is handed over need only be made once, time is not constrained.

What the sense of not wanting to be employed reacts to is the axis of decision rights. Where it reacts to the axis of time, that sense comes out not as I do not want to be employed but as I do not have enough time.

Seen through these three, the ordering of the options changes, because they line up by where the three rights of decision sit rather than by the name of the occupation.

And multiple positions exist inside the same occupation. Writing has a commissioned-production position and a position of planning and putting out your own. Design has the same two, and so does teaching. Changing position inside the same occupation is in fact a shorter distance than changing occupation.

Nor do all three have to move at once, because they move independently.

The second — the right to decide how — can sometimes be partly recovered inside employment. Being trusted with the procedure, proposing how to proceed. This can become an object of negotiation.

The first — the right to decide what — hardly moves inside employment, since deciding what is done is the employing side’s right in the first place. To move this, one line has to be built outside.

The third — the right to judge good or bad — comes to hand automatically at the moment one line is built outside, because nobody performs acceptance testing. So placing even one thing outside moves the first and third at once.

Returning to the list of occupations, the occupations set out there said nothing about these three rights of decision. So whichever is chosen from the list, the position is not settled. What should be chosen is not the occupation but the position.

Comparing with Employment Requires Splitting Stability in Two First

There is a natural objection. Stability is obtained by handing over the zone of acceptance. Stop handing it over and is stability not simply lost?

The objection is half right and half off.

The right part. What is obtained in return for handing over the zone of acceptance is real. A fixed amount arriving monthly, not having to look for work, half of the social insurance being borne by another. These are consideration, not benevolence. They are received because something is handed over.

The part that is off. Stability has two contents.

The first is stability of amount. The same amount arrives each month. Employment is indeed superior here.

The second is stability of continuation. Whether that income exists next year, or in five years. Employment is not necessarily at any special advantage here, because it can end on the company’s judgement. And the ending can be settled without notice to the employee.

The second has a further property peculiar to one side. In employment there is only one source of income. The counterparty being one company, being cut takes the whole amount to zero. In a form with several clients, one being cut does not take the whole.

So in the sense of variation of amount, employment is more stable; in the sense of concentration of source, employment is more concentrated. Properties facing opposite ways are being spoken of under the one word stability.

Inside the range handed over, the use of time cannot be decided by you either. That also means it is hard to secure time to build the next source of income. The item handed over in order to obtain stability is eating into the time for building the means of leaving that stability. Here the structure does not mesh.

The objection has a further correctness. In the early period of independence, both kinds of stability fall. The amount varies, and the source too concentrates into one — the first client. A state worse than employment is passed through for a time.

Underestimating this period leads to a mistaken judgement. The concentration of income sources immediately after independence can in fact be higher than in employed days, since it begins from a state of having only one company.

So the answer to the objection is not go independent and you will be stable. It goes as far as the word stability pointing at two things, one of which favours employment and the other of which is settled by form. And improving the latter requires either increasing the number of clients or building something that remains to hand. Both take time.

What is being compared here is structure and not individual situations. In some trades employment is more stable in both senses. In fields protected by regulation, or professions for which substitution is difficult, the continuity of income on the employed side is very high. In that case the conclusion of comparing the two kinds of stability changes.

The Zone of Acceptance Cannot Be Made Zero

A state of holding all three rights of decision on your own side does not hold in practice.

As long as something is handed to another for consideration, their requirements enter somewhere. Whether it is bought is decided by them, and what they do not want will not sell.

So the state aimed at is not taking nobody’s requirements. That means there is nobody receiving, which is incompatible with income.

Precisely stated, the difference lies in the order in which the requirement enters.

In the form of handing over a range first, the requirement enters as instruction. It comes after the handing over, so there is no premise for declining. Declining amounts to reneging on the range handed over.

In the form of making first and leaving it in place, the requirement enters as response. It comes after the making, so whether to take it in can be judged. Choosing not to take it in is not a breach of contract.

Even under the same phrase meeting the other party’s requirements, these two are different operations. The former is the discharge of an obligation; the latter is a judgement.

And what the wish not to be employed reacts to is not the existence of requirements but this order. If requirements themselves were the objection, no dealing with anyone would be possible. In practice even people holding this sense answer the requirements of counterparties they chose with enthusiasm.

So the response is not to reduce requirements. It is to reverse the order.

Reverse the order and the same requirement is received differently.

A requirement arriving as instruction has whether to comply settled before the soundness of its content is examined. So even where the content seems wrong, there is nowhere to use that judgement. A judgement that cannot be used becomes wear as it stands.

A requirement arriving as response has the soundness of its content as the entrance to judgement. If three people say the same thing, that is information worth examining. If only one does, it may be that one person’s circumstances. The same words can be handled differently.

And this difference in handling becomes a large difference over time. In a form where judgement can be used, judgement improves. In a form where it cannot, judgement itself wears away. Coming to process whatever is said as that is how it is follows from a long period with nowhere to use judgement.

So the problem of order is not only a problem of wearing now. It is also a problem of whether judgement remains some years from now.

The form with the order reversed carries its own burden: when it misses, nobody else can be blamed.

Where something made to instruction does not sell, responsibility lies with the commissioning side. Where something decided and made by you does not sell, that judgement is yours. This burden is real and it is not light.

So reversing the order cannot be called an improvement for everyone. For someone to whom holding judgement is heavy, handing it over is genuinely easier. The choice of handing over is not itself an error.

What becomes a problem is only the case of not noticing that it is being handed over. Noticing, the quantity can be chosen. Not noticing, the quantity is settled by practice.

Last Week’s Work Gives the Position of the Three

Which side the three rights of decision currently sit on can be counted from last week’s actual work, rather than traced through memory.

Of the work you did last week, what proportion had what was done decided by you? Produce a proportion. Near zero, and the first right of decision is entirely outside.

Of last week’s work, was there anything for which you made the final judgement of good or bad? Even one, and the third right is partly to hand. Zero, and all judgement is outside.

Of your income, what proportion had the figure decided by you? This is a composite of the first and third, since setting a figure means deciding both what is handed over and what it is worth.

Contractual status is absent from all three. An employee and a contractor can answer them the same way. And the answers do not fully correlate with status. There are independent people with all three near zero, and employees with the second and third partly to hand.

The three proportions are the position you actually occupy. And the sense of not wanting to be employed is reacting to these proportions. Not to the name of the contract.

The proportions next month will be the same. Counting them does not narrow the range handed over. Counting is still worth doing because, with three of them, whichever comes out lowest settles which single place to work on.

The phrasing I do not want to be employed states a refusal and does not state a state. So nothing to do next comes out of it. Last week there was not one piece of income whose figure I set does state a state, and one thing to do comes out of that.

And that single thing can be carried out without resigning, because moving the position is a different operation from cutting the contract.

Not disliking work, and not wanting to be employed. The two sat together not because the sense was contradictory. One of them was looking at the content of the work, and the other at who decides that content. Put both on a single measure and one of them disappears. Hold two measures and it is the sitting together that starts to look natural.

Advice setting out ways of getting outside employment sits on that same measure. It is accurate about the procedure for getting out and says nothing about what becomes of the third item once out. Those pieces took on only one of the two questions. Only with both in place do the options become comparable.

It went unsaid because saying it turned the conversation to earning. The three proportions do not turn into a conversation about earning. They answer only for last week’s work, so they require neither a plan to resign nor a next thing lined up. Whom to tell, or whether to leave it unsaid, can be decided once the proportions are out.

By what mechanism who sets the figure — where the first and third rights overlap — comes to sit on the other party’s side is handled in Before you negotiate a higher rate, look at who is setting the figure. How the difference in the form of handing over decides the ceiling on income is in What to know before earning on your own: the ceiling on selling time; for the whole structure, start at Getting out of the labour-intensive form. Where the same sense is held in the language of aptitude, see Not being cut out for employment; where it is being questioned in the language of morality, see The answer to “not wanting to work is just self-indulgence”; and the stage of actually cutting the contract is handled in Being unable to move towards independence is not a matter of resolve. How the three rights bear on the side of the living — that is, on whose judgement next month’s living costs arise — is handled in How to live when you do not want to work turns on amount, continuity, and who decides, divided into three conditions: the amount, its continuity, and who decides that it breaks off.