This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: Employment vs. freedom Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

I was told that if I discussed anything to do with work then I was representing the company and must conform to their rules. Obviously I dispute this strongly - this is like saying we have a new feudal system where companies are the lords and employees are mere serfs who they own. -- Joe Gordon

I'm tempted to say - "precisely". Elsewhere Esther documents other degradations of the work contract and steps people currently stuck in employee positions can take to restore some sanity to the situation.

When I reflect on what's happening to the work contract in our industry (and many related industries, and I'll come back to how they're related) I try to take a bit of historical perspective. The work contract as we know it arose from the balance of power between the "working masses" and large corporations, and this situation in turn arose as a result of the industrial revolution. So, essentially, the situation covered by the "standard" understanding of the work contract is that of the factory worker.

If you work in a factory, you're essentially loaning out your hands and body to the employer, and during working hours you essentially become part of the "means of production", to use the Marxist term. It seems a logical necessity that your agreeing to the work contract entails giving up some freedom of movement. You can't provide the service the employee is paying for if you wander out of the factory. The employer "owns" your hands etc. during working hours, effectively. This is naturally subject to various regulations, in particular on overtime, safety, etc. to ensure that your body does not become useless to yourself; failing such obligations on the part of the employer, what you would have would indeed be slavery.

This is all kind of obvious, but now consider that this exact same contract with the same kind of safeguards is increasingly being used in what we may call "knowledge industries" - those where what employees bring to the means of production is their brains, not their hands.

This may seem like merely an extension of the concept, but in fact it's much more problematic. Thinking is a lot more holographic than working with one's hands. The insight you apply to today's problem might come as a direct result of musing you did this week-end while out fishing. Does it even make sense to compensate a knowledge worker for the time they spend on the job ? It's not obvious that it does, but that's what we keep right on doing, essentially out of habit.

It's even harder in the case of people like Joe Gordon, whose story I linked to above. What brought matters to a head in Joe's case was ostensibly blogging, but I suspect that the problems are much deeper than this one epiphenomenon of the Internet, and affect the entire range of knowledge industries. Joe works in a bookstore - he's paid, in essence, to have opinions, to be passionate about some books, and so on. His work is who he is, not what he does. The problem is that the freedom to be who you are isn't one that can be "temporarily" turned over to an employer. It's entirely holographic.

All knowledge is basically like that - it's a matter of who you are, not of what you do. It's something you can sell - that's what I do as a consultant. But it's not something you can meter, and that spells trouble for the work contract as we know it. That's the root of both Joe's problem, and the problems of the "EA spouse" with overtime - the employers are not getting out of the contract something measurable enough to be managed well, and they're reacting by trying to extend the claim over employees that the contract gives them.