The Appropriation of Time and Space
in Gray Zones Between Employment and Self-Employment in France

Patrick Cingolani^[1]

Abstract

This chapter questions the conventional binary of employment vs. self-employment in exploring the idea of autonomy, the self-government involved in task-oriented as opposed to clock-oriented activity—a distinction important to E. P. Thompson. Though a form of agency under constraint, it is instanced in practices that are not subordinated to the imperatives of capitalist productivity or other heteronomous ends.

Both employment and self-employment have regularly involved practices of autonomy: in the one, in efforts to avoid hierarchical subjection; in the other, in the pursuit of margins of freedom in the labor market, often in order to address concerns about meaning and purpose. The gray zone is not limited to the development of bogus self-employment (Supiot); it also arises from the quest for autonomy within the asymmetry of capitalist relations. The aspiration to independence cannot be understood only as acquiescence to neoliberal ideology; it also has to be seen as a quest for autonomy expressed in a variety of practices that aim to circumvent the asymmetry between capital and labor and so make it possible to live work differently.

While the critique of bogus self-employment and the fight for the protections of formal employment are important, so are the many ways in which workers today seek to make work their own. The chapter thus concludes by looking at practices associated with non-subordination (multiactivity, self-organization, cooperatives, etc.). Might a struggle to extend social protection to self-employment (as in French arrangements for intermittent work) and to facilitate the alternation of periods of subordination and independence yet see the development of a labor law not predicated on the subordination of employment?
   
Keywords: Worker autonomy; self-employment; subordination; A. Supiot; task-orientation; teleworking; E.P. Thompson.

---

In this chapter, the metaphor of the gray zone is used not so much to capture recent shifts across the world of work as to illuminate the relationship between subordination and independence.^[2] The deadlock that follows from treating these as contraries I seek to escape in employing the category of autonomy and so moving beyond “the binary logic that defines employment and independence as mutually exclusive” (Corsani 2020). The observed clouding of the distinction between independence and subordination is not the result of legal developments alone but the outcome of practices, formal or informal, in work and in non-work life. Law is subsequent to the facts, and fact-finding falls within the realm of sociology. Sociological research has long since shown how the use of space brings about appropriation (Lefebvre 1991, 165–68; Lefebvre 2001, 198), and how practices and tactics that reflect workers’ autonomy can result in the reappropriation, to a degree, of the time and space of subordination (Certeau 1980). Workers have often found ways of avoiding managerial control and escaping the time constraints of employment by reshaping what Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”;^[3] such stratagems are described in historical work on the nineteenth century (Thompson 1966; Rancière 1981; Gauny and Rancière 1985) and in more recent sociological studies of precarious labor (Cingolani 1986) and of work in the culture industries (Cingolani 2014; McRobbie 2015). As Thompson and Rancière both note, workers’ struggles for autonomy and for the emancipation that is its most complete expression reflect a desire for an experience of work freed of domination. To restrict oneself to matters of law alone, however, is to presuppose workers’ acceptance of the official rules of a workplace that is intrinsically conflictual and to ignore the existence of practices foreign to the normative framework of employment. Changes have come, too, from movement along lines of flight (Deleuze 2002) and the impact of external factors; the situation we find ourselves in with the climate crisis only highlights the importance of what is happening at the margins of industrial society and its hegemonic model. The recent “Great Resignation” (Klotz 2021; Cohen 2021) in the United States, and the particular mode of expression it found in France, with young engineering graduates questioning the environmentally destructive activities they had been trained for (Moulier-Boutang 2023), demonstrate the relationship between attitudes to work and wider social phenomena. Alternative forms of life and work that circumvent the constraints of employment are examples of a “deregulation from below” of the norms of work.

In an influential article on labor law in France, the gray zone was described as a space between employment and self-employment (Supiot 2000). While the contract of employment entails subordination, reflecting “the power it confers on one person over another” (Supiot 2007, 110), self-employed workers, in principle, escape this subordination, because they make their own decisions regarding how they work, who they work for, and how much they will charge. The social reality behind the concept of self-employment is however so diverse and has witnessed so many changes, notably with the introduction in France, in 2008, of a new legal framework (auto-entrepreneuriat), that the main effect of its growth has been to complicate and obscure the question of power. At the same time, in abandoning discipline for incentives, post-Fordist employment practices have reduced the weight of direct control, leaving more scope for workers’ initiative. On the one hand, independence has given way to a subordination that takes various forms as the self-employed find themselves caught up in an asymmetry of power. Such figures as farmers, designers and delivery workers are too weak, as individuals, to resist the pressure of big corporations, given the informational and financial asymmetry between the parties, and their notional independence loses all meaning. On the other, employers now take advantage of subordinated workers’ desire for initiative and self-determination, harnessing workers’ creative energy to their own ends through new ways of controlling and appropriating labor. More and more employees have to act as if self-employed while trapped into acting to serve the employers’ goals alone through management by objectives. Workers’ “freedom” is then reduced to taking responsibility for carrying out a task or completing a mission, however long that may take. Caught within the toils of subordination, any “autonomy” is only apparent. In both employment and self-employment, the forms of autonomy have been undermined by a de facto or de jure asymmetry, leaving only a bogus autonomy. “Being an employee is no longer about giving up a certain amount of one’s time and mechanically obeying orders in exchange for remuneration, but about giving ‘the best of oneself’ in order to maximize income. In other words, behaving as if one were self-employed. So it is that one arrives at the fiction of the employee employed on his own account” (Supiot 2000, 134).

This notion of fiction stands at the heart of Supiot’s analysis of the mechanisms leading to changes in work and in the forms taken by subordination over recent decades. Yet is it adequate? While there is indeed legal fiction, notably fictions of self-employment, this cannot to be read as purely and simply a means to exploitation. For what appears as a new form of social relationship also represents a different way of living the sensual, corporeal realities of work, and a psychic escape, however slight, from subordination. This is what is at issue not just in the alternative practices evoked above but in any attempt to elude or to modify the traditional employment relationship. For cycle couriers, platform work represents a chance to escape managerial control and discipline. Echoing other studies conducted in France, Callum Cant (2019, 84), who cannot be said to underplay the power of the platforms, notes that “You get to be outside all day, constantly moving about, and never have a manager calling you in to cover a closing shift on a few hours’ notice. There was a sense of autonomy and independence to the job that wasn’t entirely illusory.” Temporal flexibility is no empty word for ride-hail drivers, however economically dependent they may be. Given the lack of assigned schedules, workers can make themselves available as they choose, without having to ask management for permission to take breaks for personal or family commitments (Benvegnù and Bernard 2023). Although the situation is changing under the influence of new technologies, the logistics and transport sector has long offered this kind of relative independence to low-skilled workers, for whom self-employment can seem an alternative to employment under working conditions degraded by the demands of capital and completely at the beck and call of managers (Levy 2022). It is true that capital can and does work passenger drivers and delivery drivers to exhaustion, reminiscent in some ways of the old “sweating system”. On the streets of Paris, couriers sub-contract their food delivery accounts to migrants: “The exploitation of the labourer by capital is here effected through the exploitation of the labourer by the labourer” (Marx 1991, 695). Many couriers suffer from poor pay, accidents and injuries. But what do the workers themselves think about these varied circumstances and the kinds of independence they offer?

One is often struck by sociologists’ failure to acknowledge the many reasons for wanting to elude or escape subordination through self-employment that ultimately have less to do with the fantasy of entrepreneurship of the self or individualist forms of self-valuation and self-promotion than with the desire to explore other ways of relating to oneself, to others and to work. The self-employment in retail or craft associated with certain minorities is not so much concerned with the idea of entrepreneurship as with avoiding the discrimination and stigma associated with factory work, as Madoui (2012) reports of the Algerian immigration in France, and perhaps also avoiding its discipline. We need then to think of self-employment in terms of the autonomy it offers. Both employment and self-employment entail negotiating the asymmetry of contractual relations that subordinate in different ways, in the face of the particular mechanisms of control and subjection from which a degree of autonomy is to be won. Seen in this way, the gray zone shifts: it is no longer a conceptual gray area between employment and self-employment, as Supiot would have it, but represents the field of tensions around workers’ aspiration to autonomy, whatever their employment status.

Here, then, we shall be looking at the question of autonomy in both employment and self-employment, identifying behaviors and practices that have in fact to be understood as critiques of subordination in actu. After revisiting the experience of autonomy as presented by E. P. Thompson in some of his most important work (1), we consider the tangled relations between subordination and independence and the diverse combinations in which these have been put to use by employers, as analyzed notably by Supiot (2). Then, returning to my previous work, and drawing on recent research on teleworking,^[4] I will try and show how autonomy is an operative concept necessary to any understanding of the contradictions associated with experience of subordination in both employment and self-employment.

A Return to Independence

In his description of the forms of life of seventeenth-century rural weavers in Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, E. P. Thompson gives an idea of what non-subordinate work might look like (Thompson 1967). What was distinctive about this way of living and working was not so much an absence of heteronomy—workers were still subject to laws, to social rules, and to the constraints inherent to climate, seasonality, cultivation and animal husbandry—but rather the way the temporal constraints involved were lived without counting the minutes or hours, without working by the clock. Work was characterized by a certain accord of practices with their environments, without the artificializing and expropriative techniques introduced by capitalism. The work of weaving was not tied to fixed hours, nor was it incompatible with also attending to other matters: watching a child at play or in the cradle, chatting with a neighbor while working, taking a break from work to check on an animal, and so on. What is more, in the farming context, should it be necessary to work nights to harvest grain before a storm, should the birth of a lamb present particular problems, should milking be necessary morning and night, these all took their place in “natural” patterns of work whose seemingly fragmented successions of tasks reflected a life of multiple activities. In distinguishing in his discussion between “task-oriented time” and “clock time”, Thompson sketches the features of what can only be called an independent worker, not yet subject to the quantification represented by clock time and the rationalization of work and the time of work that come with it. He portrays a familiar intercourse with social and natural environments, while the rationalization of production created, in the industrial towns, a worker torn from every familiar context, a worker interchangeable with every other. Industry is subject to the abstract, objective, countable temporality of the urban environment, in which human beings come to be mere “numbers in a calculation” (Simmel 2021). The regime of wage employment reaps the fruits of a rationalization and a standardization of bodies borrowed from the colonial regime and the exploitation of enslaved populations, torn from their native context and assigned to work stripped of all everyday meaning^[5] (Tsing 2015, 40, quoting Mintz 1985, 47). This is why the “abolition of the wages system” (Marx 1969) was long a dream in Europe, though one that faded with the relative neutralization of its socio-economic violence. The autonomy the artisan or farmer-artisan enjoyed within their distinctive temporalities was admittedly not sheltered from capitalist developments, being subject to the market and the laws of supply and demand. In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson describes the decline and pauperization of the nineteenth-century weavers subject to the competition of manufacturing industry and faced with the enclosure of the commons (Thompson 1966). Factory work and the mechanical loom replaced the weavers’ handlooms, leaving them bled dry and demeaned in their dignity as independent workers. Extraordinary reductions in prices and wages and the destruction of customary practices and union protections eventually turned the weavers into “proletarian outworkers,” a cheap auxiliary labor force for the factories (Thompson 1966, 271).

Rejecting any notion that workers are automatically united into a single revolutionary mass by the effects of large-scale industry (Marx 1848), I would argue that contemporary labor relations are in fact pervaded by the issue of individual autonomy, raising questions about how we think of subordination. The unity of the working class and the motifs of its struggle for liberation are not the effects of any economic determinism but the outcome of political action. What Thompson (1966, 1988) did, precisely, was to show that workers’ political activity was the key to class formation. Artisans—self-employed workers—were not a socially or intellectually backward class but, on the contrary, sometimes heroic agents of democratic struggle, champions of equality and of social and political rights in the face of the destructive dynamics of capitalism. Despite the tendency to devalue autonomy as a category complicit with capital, I see it as a crucial, motivating issue for both the employed and the self-employed. My concern here, in fact, is not with the fact of exploitation but the forms of life and of resistance that come with it. These matters are complex, however, for things are not as clear as they were in the past. Not only do independence and subordination wear new faces, but workers’ aspiration to independence and creativity has often found self-contradictory expression, being turned against itself by contemporary management techniques.

The Twentieth Century and the Undermining of the Distinction Between Subordination and Independence

In his work on the legal subordination of the worker in France, Supiot (2000; 2015) gives numerous examples of employment arrangements that exploit the ambivalence of worker autonomy to perpetuate subordination or to so qualify a largely fictive independence as to institute precariousness or de facto economic dependence. On the one hand, the requirement for personal engagement in service occupations and the ever-increasing need for employees to take the initiative, to respond to changing circumstances, to innovate or to create, entails arrangements that combine independence with subordination (Supiot 2000). As Supiot explains, it is a matter of returning to workers the autonomy that allows them to deploy their talents, while also safeguarding the essential, that is, the employer’s control over the fruits of their work. Employees then find themselves under obligation in terms of result rather than means. As always, it is a question of employers managing the risk inherent in the employment contract, not so much in terms of controlling and standardizing working practices as of controlling the person so that they “give of their best”. On the other hand, different forms of bogus self-employment continue to multiply, spurred to a large extent by the outsourcing of the workforce. Starting in the 1960s, this process for long turned on the introduction of non-standard and temporary employment (Cingolani 2023), but recent years have seen self-employment increasingly exploited to the same end in a number of European countries, digital platforms playing a notably significant role in this. For them, despite multiple indicators of subordination, self-employment seems to have become the default status: delivery drivers, ride-hailing or “ride-sharing” drivers and click workers are registering as self-employed on a massive scale.

The idea that ostensibly lies behind the technology, responsible for the radical misunderstanding of the real character of the relationships involved, is that of sharing with its connotations of good will (Sundararajan 2016; Scholz 2016). This notion of giving a hand, of helping each other out, has obscured the reality of rules and controls. The incorporeal, “wireless” character of today’s information and communications technologies has likewise fostered the belief that the worker is not bound or subordinated, even as the algorithm and the GPS together constitute a panopticon such as Bentham could never even have imagined (Foucault 1975). It is the pretense of sharing that maintains the illusion of independence and the denial of subordination—a denial that generally prevails among consumers/clients and even among the “partners” who do the work or provide the service, whether it is an apartment, a ride, or farm work in exchange for room and board that is in question. All are users of the platform and, as they are doing each other a service, the commercial relationship entailed seems far removed from subordination. That is, to this day, the argument raised by Uber’s lawyers in cases about the employment status of their drivers, in response to evidence of the classic indicators of subordination. Uber is not a transport company but a technology company that rents the use of its software to drivers. “Fundamentally, the commercial relationship between these drivers and transportation providers and Uber is one where they are our customer, where we license to them our software, and we receive a fee for doing that” (Rosenblat 2018).

This kind of reading, which pairs denial of the subordination of the bogus self-employed with the fictional portrayal of the employee as independent, perfectly illustrates the complex and even perverse way in which subordination and independence come to collide, overlap and interpenetrate. The question, though, is what the workers might be getting out of it. Specialists in employment law like Alain Supiot are less concerned with the worker’s subjective experience than with the formal, objective character of contractual relations. Yet this leaves something out: what the worker finds, invents, feels or imagines in that social relationship. Analysis of the socio-economic constraints that prompt workers’ acceptance of precarious employment (e.g., in platform work), or their willingness to invest themselves in their work, fails to take into account how much workers appreciate autonomy, the satisfactions they find in it. The legal relationship and the indicators of power to control that are at issue in court do not account for the entirety of a lived experience that also includes the effective margin of freedom allowed by the independence accorded. There can be no question of denying the reality of asymmetry and domination, but I want to insist here, nonetheless, on what in the artifice of self-employment itself is the sign of another relation, the trace of a different way of living the relationship to work. To work as if free is not simply to be hoodwinked by management; it also reflects a real dissatisfaction with work as traditionally understood and an implicit critique of subordination, as I earlier sought to show in my Révolution précaire (Cingolani 2014). Autonomy at work is a way of managing the relationship of subordination by living it differently.

Teleworking and Autonomy

To investigate what might be at issue in this imbrication of subordination and independence, workers’ relationship to teleworking seemed to offer a promising terrain. In teleworking, and very notably at the time of what we might call its accidental breakthrough with the Covid pandemic, autonomy is directly tied to employment with no question of the independence canonically associated with self-employment.^[6] The arrangements made for working from home, covering a few days a week or even weeks on end, have de facto established a relationship of autonomy within subordination that is both distinctive and complex. Like the other hybrid forms evoked above (independence in subordination in employment, bogus self-employment) teleworking is fraught with ambiguities, but, more importantly, it represents the beginnings of an as yet incomplete historical turn whose outcome will depend on future developments in managerial practice. In fact, there are two main options: either a return to previous forms of organization using company premises, or an amplification of the digital presence in the home and the penetration of control into the domestic sphere. Today, human resources managers and researchers are increasingly talking about a fall in productivity and high costs of coordination, and are suggesting bringing staff back . . . to the office! (Economist, July 2023).

In France, teleworking was abruptly introduced in the context of the pandemic. After the first two lockdowns of 2020, however, some managers began to see it as a very promising tool or strategy in its own right, prompting a more systematic approach. Since then, it has become ever more prevalent, widespread, indeed, even if mostly restricted to managers and higher occupational categories, while France remains one of the European countries with the lowest numbers of teleworkers, fewer than Germany, Italy, Britain or Spain (Aksoy et al. 2023). Whatever might be its future, it is worth investigating as it presently exists for the important light it sheds on how—in the contingent context of the pandemic—a practice of independence within subordination emerged, and what this has meant for employees. While some insist on the damaging effects of remote work on the possibilities for socializing and consequently on the conditions of union mobilization, and distance from company premises does indeed have consequences in terms of social isolation that are often not compensated for by relations with family or neighbors, workers’ relatively strong and widespread support for teleworking testifies to the positives they find in it: the possibility of new autonomies within subordination, autonomies reflected in the diversification of work environments and working habits found in practice.

One of the appealing aspects of teleworking is that it allows a certain latitude in the organization of work and introduces new usages of both domestic and working space. It brings about, in different ways in different circumstances, a pluralization of space, and with that a change in the subjective meaning of work thanks to the change of environment. Teleworkers report using a variety of spaces for work: living room, bedroom, kitchen, garden, bar, garage, and attic conversion among others. These arrangements could sometimes be the result of objective constraints: during the pandemic, for example, some people worked in their bedrooms or kitchens because their apartments didn’t allow for a dedicated office. They might also have consequences for working conditions: the lack of ergonomically adapted furniture, of an adequately large screen. Yet the fact remains that this diversification of the working environment in many ways reflects a becoming-independent of subordinate work, and is one aspect of teleworking’s appeal. With it come relatively minor changes that nonetheless considerably affect the experience of work. Working in pajamas, surrounding oneself with candles or incense, listening to one’s favorite music, hearing the background chatter of the café, inhabiting a familiar space: all these change the character of work as everyday experience. The circumstances associated with work also become different and more various: putting on a washing machine, watching a child, listening out for an elderly mother’s movements upstairs, supervising preparations for lunch, taking time out to call a friend, catching up with administrative paperwork, admiring a flower in the garden, etc. The new spatial freedom can even allow for complete changes of scenery, working the last day of the week at one’s parents’ or at a friend’s, for example, or taking one’s work to a seaside resort; it can enable further steps to optimize work and leisure time and the time spent in traveling; and it might likewise permit a long hoped-for move out of the city. For the new relationship to possibilities it opens up can nourish the imagination, prompting thoughts of living and working elsewhere, perhaps for a better life in a rural or peri-urban setting, in a different economic context from that of the big city, with lower rents and more space for one’s money, a more engaged relationship with the local. One could say that with the introduction of teleworking, subordination finds itself corroded by an autonomy that draws its resources from the familiar and the everyday.

It is by such practices, which offer a distant echo of the mode of life of the farmer artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that we may measure the re-appropriation of work that is occurring. Though still an instance of the “subordinate work” in which employees are accorded no freedom in their execution of the contract (Supiot 2019)—teleworking leads willy-nilly to an appropriation in practice, to the extent allowed, de facto, by the new arrangements. It is as though the introduction of teleworking, repeatedly delayed, since its promotion by French prime minister Raymond Barre in the 1970s, by the employers who held it in suspicion on account of the opportunities it might offer for abuse, has finally begun to live up to its transgressive potential. For Lefebvre, appropriation is not a relationship of possession but a relationship of use, a way of inhabiting time and space, “the process whereby individuals or groups make something external to them their own” (Lefebvre 2001). Workers have always had a degree of control over their working space and conditions of work, and the social event that was the inception of teleworking with Covid, seized on as an opportunity, has led to a major reconfiguration, bringing about a qualitative leap in affected employees’ relationship to autonomy. In doing their work in their own homes, they have made a breach in the fabric of subordination and turned that work, to a degree, to their own ends. Teleworking does away with certain means of coercion and liberates certain possibilities. Alternation between different spheres of life, the possibility of escaping the specter of control—these transform the experience of work, which had before essentially belonged to capital.

The freedom in the use of space sustained by employees’ everyday relationship to the home also has effects on time. Lefebvre distinguished, among urban times, between free time, time under compulsion (corresponding to working time), and time under constraint (under which he counts time spent in travel and in dealing with administrative formalities) (Lefebvre 2001). Under teleworking, the employee not only limits travel time but also contrives ways to reduce the time under constraint devoted to domestic chores. This is less a matter of gaining time, in the sense of maximizing time saved, than of freeing up time by moving activities from one temporal register to another. One of our respondents noted, as did others, that teleworking frees up time at the weekend by shifting time under constraint: “Teleworking lets you do your grocery shopping during the day, when there’s a lull, or at the end of the morning. You do less shopping at the weekend, you do more shopping during the working week.” Another highlights the greater leeway that teleworking affords for the organization of private life. Others schedule their activities in such a way as to allow them their distinctive temporalities. What previously had to be squeezed into the complexity and simultaneity of hurried multi-activity, such as doing one’s shopping on the way back from the office, might now be carried out in its own proper, recreative time. At certain times, work itself in this way takes on a distinctive quality through its relationship to a particular space.

Teleworking at home can offer employees a way of working more intensively, by separating them from colleagues and their unwelcome demands, and might we say from an office atmosphere sometimes ruined by the capitalist organization of work? Employees’ real assent to work changes the subjective experience of the constraints of employment, reaffirming their decision-making power, their freedom to determine their rhythm of work. One might, for example, work harder now so as to be able to slack or take time off later in the day or indeed the week. Conversely, the escape that teleworking can offer from the customary prioritization of work over private life, with some arrangements, for example, making it possible to attend a medical appointment without having to seek the employer’s permission, frees time from the petty servitudes of the employment routine. This increases the margin of freedom in two ways: by distancing workers from the asymmetrical structure of the managerial order and in instituting an organization of time that draws its legitimacy from the worker him- or herself. Finally, the ability to modify arrangements for work and the quest for ergonomic efficiency in the achievement of a work goal paradoxically represent, in what could be seen as assent to subordination, an affirmation of autonomy. Employees can use time to change spaces (e.g. going to work in the country at the end of the week, taking the train on a Thursday) or use space to change time, given that, as we have seen, the relationship to space defines distinctive temporalities. Teleworking thus offers a potential for freedom that makes it significantly different from regular work in the office.

Issues of Telework and Issues of Autonomy

Taking its own distinctive path with all its twists and turns, sociology has ended up with its own version of the Marxist commonplace about waged work, endorsing the schematic representation of a capitalism that sets off the process of workers’ emancipation through the impact of large-scale industry. “With the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more” (Marx 2017, 63). The historical canonization of this cliché has almost made us forget the working-class demand for the “abolition of wage-labor.” While this might seem outdated as a slogan in a society framed, one might say, upon waged employment, it does bear within it a recognition of capitalism’s intrinsic flaw: the dispossession of the individual worker, and of workers as a class, of their relationship to what they do and of control over the conditions in which they do it. It is this that all alternative social forms of work seek to palliate or do away with; it is the lack that gives rise to different kinds of aspiration to autonomy.

Operaismo, as we find it in Bruno Trentin and André Gorz, retained this idea of autonomy of action at work, of the worker’s de facto independence within the relationship of subordination. In La città del lavoro, Italian trade-union leader Trentin sought to “define a policy of full employment that no longer separates the creation of new job opportunities from improvement in the quality of work, the enhancement of content, the extension of autonomy and participation in decision-making” (Trentin 1997, 110). In a number of his books, André Gorz offers an excoriating critique of the alienated work of employees, whom he sees as now stripped of power. In the specific context of the 1980s, in Farewell to the Working Class he describes work in production or services as “passive”, programmed, leaving no room for personal initiative (Gorz 1982, 38). In his subsequent work, it is notably to activity that is its own end that he looks for autonomy. Activity stands to work as autonomy stands to subordination, the one in tension with the other. Multi-activity becomes a word synonymous with different spheres and moments of autonomy. The polar alternatives are then the integration of multi-activity into work, as one of its forms, or the multiplication of the temporalities and rhythms of life to accord with a new form of autonomy. In other words, the restoration of the power of living activity over the apparatus and social process of production or the ever more complete enslavement of the former to the latter (Gorz 1999, 73). Unlike Trentin, Gorz looks for autonomy outside work and its capitalist organization, in the multiplicity of social deviations from subordination, unstable oases of autonomy, which is why he is the herald of contemporary forms of “alternative work”.

Employees’ appropriations of teleworking restore, to some degree, this autonomy of action at work, providing better conditions for its realization than are normally afforded by employment’s relationship of subordination. But while this autonomy remains marginal, given that the purpose of work is heteronomously prescribed, it also has a wider effect in reconfiguring the sphere of work itself. In this respect, it enables what Jacques Rancière spoke of in discussing the meaning of emancipation: Not so much choice of purpose as the modification of the very temporality and spatiality of work. To turn one’s time into a different time than the temporality of subordination within the relationship of subordination itself, or, as Rancière put it: “to be able to construct sites where one escapes the law of domination” (Rancière 2017, 50). This question of the appropriation of work, of workers making their own use of work, shows that struggles over the gray zone cannot limit themselves to a demand for subordination and the guarantees and protections that come with it. The horizon of aspiration and demand in the face of the outsourcing of the workforce—notably through recourse to platform work or self-employment—has been the legal reclassification of the working relationship through the recognition of subordination. Such recognition, however, is insufficient. To confine oneself to this, to insisting on the protections that come with subordination, is to ignore what has historically been at issue in the critique of waged work: liberation. Like temporary work earlier (Cingolani 2023), platforms are put to a variety of uses by workers, uses that seek to loosen the disciplinary constraints of employment and to escape the often noxious social relationships associated with it. Flexible hours and the opportunity they offer to switch between work and creative or recreational activities, and the avoidance of employment, and hence escape from the realities and culture of hierarchy and the emergence of a sensibility distinct from that fostered by the disciplines of the workplace: these all nourish a new sense of freedom. Platforms are not for all that a means to emancipation; I have myself shown the deleterious consequences of the radical fragmentation of labor that they foster—not to speak of their consequences for employment (Cingolani 2021). Yet their effects are not one-dimensionally evil, given the uses to which they can be put and the nature of these uses considered from the worker’s point of view. Though a variety of relationships to subordination are emerging within employment, the latter cannot be seen as an emancipation. Employment can be both a basis for emancipation and also quite the opposite, as evidenced in various ways by the professionals who lose freedom and creativity upon their assimilation into employment. Employment then appears as a burden, an imposition that involves, in a variety of milieux, compelled assent to an endlessly proliferating neoliberal bureaucracy. It is precisely the ill-effects of this that have led not only to the growing number of deserters, to the defections recently in the news (the “Great Resignation”), but also, absent from the hegemonic discourses of the media, the prevalence of career changes and other attempted solutions to the malaise and sense of uselessness that haunt certain professions—a mood exemplified in France by a collective commencement address by the young graduates of the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences (AgroParisTech) that urged engineers to avoid toxic jobs.

My research for Révolutions précaires—in which I looked at self-employment and at different kinds of autonomous work that escape the dominant temporalities of labor for evidences of an aspiration to emancipation—revealed the same dissatisfaction. Just as in teleworking, the relationship to space was modified sometimes by working from home, sometimes by coworking arrangements adopted to overcome isolation. In abandoning the trappings of employment with its hierarchy and its orders for a companionable, cooperative temporality; in shifting the physical context of activity and so changing its meaning; in adopting a tactical multi-activity that allowed them to fruitfully coordinate their free time and the time spent under constraint or obligation, alternating intermittent spells of work with periods of creativity; in all these, workers were seeking to manage the tension between what they were paid or trained to do and what they truly wanted to do.

Conclusion

Alongside the struggles for employee status and the critique of the bogus self-employment that disguises a relationship of economic dependence, it is also worth attending to the ways that work is appropriated: everyday arrangements that keep aspects of subordination at bay, practices of multi-activity at work and outside it, forms of cooperation free of the constraints of productivity and performance, or the way that digital tools are diverted to workers’ own ends, and so on. There can be no question of denying the gains that employment represents, fruit of a hard-fought argument from subordination, but neither should we deny the significance of the aspiration to autonomy that sometimes leads workers to choose self-employment. At different times and in different places, workers have won back their work, in or against paid employment. Yet policies for self-employment and for workers’ reappropriation of work more generally are significantly missing from today’s demands and struggles. Any resolution to the problems of the gray zone—this space of uncertainty, of interpenetration or overlap between employment and self-employment that one finds not only in the forms that work is taking but also in workers’ tactics and practices of autonomy—will undoubtedly lie in the law’s capacity to get to grips with it and come up with legislative solutions. This is, in a sense, what Supiot himself suggested in the early 2000s in formulating two necessary principles: “The first is to no longer conceive of labor law as the law of employment alone but as the law of all forms of work, including self-employment or voluntary work. . . . The second is that the level of workers’ protection be based on the actual need” (Supiot and Corsani 2010, 452). There is something of this too in the idea of intermittent employment as a legally recognized status (such as is accorded in France to workers in the performing arts) that allows the combination, through alternation, of subordinate and independent temporalities, the last representing for the worker a time of effective (and remunerated) autonomy (Corsani and Lazzarato 2008; Cingolani 2023). Given the paradigm of the restoration of rights and protections through the reclassification of work contracts—a solution that in principle perpetuates subordination—the status of intermittent worker makes it possible to maintain, under the protective regime of employment, the alternative and creative potential that can find no place in employment proper yet is a growing presence in a society of multi-activity. Perhaps it will ultimately be something like this that will bring order to the gray zone, the site of a troubling and disruptive social tension.

References

Aksoy, C. G., J. M. Barrero, N. Bloom, S. J. Davis, M. Dolls, and P. Zarate. 2023. Working from Home Around the Globe: 2023 Report. WFH Research. https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/GSWA-2023.pdf.

Benvegnù, C., and S. Bernard. 2023. “La bourse ou la vie ? Régimes temporels et normes parentales chez les chauffeurs Uber à Paris et à Montréal”. Revue des politiques sociales et familiales 149: 55–72.

Cant, Callum. 2019. Riding for Deliveroo. Polity.

Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.

Chauchard, J-P. 2016. “Qu’est-ce qu’un travailleur indépendant (1) ?” Droit social 11: 947–56.

Cingolani, P. 2023. La précarité. PUF.

Cingolani, P. 2021. La colonisation du quotidien. Dans les laboratoires du capitalisme de plateforme. Editions Amsterdam.

Cingolani, P. 2014. Révolutions précaires – essai sur l’avenir de l’émancipation. La Découverte.

Cingolani, P. 1986. L’Exil du précaire – récit de vies en marge du travail. Méridiens Klincksieck,

Cohen, A. 2021. “How to Quit Your Job in the Great Post-Pandemic Resignation Boom”. Bloomberg Businessweek, May 10.

Corsani, A. and M. Lazzarrato. 2008. Intermittents et précaires. Editions Amsterdam.

Corsani, A. 2020. Les chemins de la liberté, Éditions du Croquant.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish, Vintage Books.

Gauny, L. G. 1985. Le philosophe plébéien, compiled and edited by Jacques Rancière. Presses universitaires de Vincennes.

Gorz, André. 1997. Misère du présent, richesse du possible. Galilée.

Gorz, André. 1982. Farewell to the Working Class. Translated by Michael Sonnenscher. Pluto.

Gorz, André. 1999. Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society. Translated by Chris Turner. Polity.

Klotz, A. 2021. “The Covid Vaccine Means a Return to Work. And a Wave of Resignations”. Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays. NBC News Digital, May 30.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2001. Du Rural à l’Urbain. Anthropos.

Levy, K. 2022. Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance. Princeton University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1969. Value, Price and Profit. Edited by Eleanor Marx Aveling. International Co., Inc.

Marx, Karl.1867. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Vol. 1. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2017. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. Pluto.

McRobbie, Angela. 2015. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Polity.

Mintz, S., 1985. Sweetness and Power. Penguin Books.

Moulier-Boutang, Y. 2023. “La lune de la grande démission, le doigt de la valeur-travail”, Multitudes 90 (1): 7–17.

Rancière, Jacques. 1989. The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France. Translated by John Drury. Temple University Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 2021. What Times Are We Living in? A Conversation with Eric Hazan. Translated by Stephen Corcoran. Polity.

Rosenblat, A. 2018. Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. University of California Press.

Scholz, T. 2016. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

Sundararajan, A. 2016. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. MIT Press.

Supiot, Alain. 2000. “Les nouveaux visages de la subordination”. Droit social 2: 131–45.

Supiot, Alain. 2007. Critique du droit du travail, Presses Universitaires de France.

Supiot, Alain. 2010. “L’esprit de Philadelphie”, an interview with Antonella Corsani. Droit social 4: 443–56.

Supiot, Alain. 2015. La Gouvernance par le nombre. Fayard.

“The working-from-home illusion fades”. The Economist, July 2023.

Thompson, E.P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books.

Thompson, E.P. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” Past & Present 38: 56–97.

Trentin, B. 1997. La città del lavoro – Sinistra e crisi del fordismo. Feltrinelli.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.

---