Antonella Corsani^[1]

Abstract

This chapter contends that the evolution of work remuneration forms—particularly variable pay and profit-sharing—generates “gray zones” that blur the boundary between waged employment and independent work. It illustrates how these remuneration models transfer economic risk from capital to labor, weaken traditional indicators of subordination, and, above all, reshape subjective identities in ways that undermine the capital-labor antagonism and collective resistance. Finally, it spotlights a distinctive cooperative model (the cooperative of activities and employment), which orchestrates a “desertion” from the gray zone and instead fosters a zone of cooperation, mutual protection, and resistance.
    
Keywords: Work remuneration; Variable pay; Profit-sharing; Gray zones; Economic risk transfer; Subjectivity; Capital–labor antagonism; Collective resistance; Cooperatives of activities and employment (CAE)

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Words to Describe Pay for Work

In capitalist societies where wage labor dominates labor relations, the concept of pay is often equated with “wages”. However, in the Anglo-American context, there are two terms for employee pay: wages and salaries. Wages typically refer to pay by the hour or day, common in temporary or manual jobs. The term derives from the Latin wadium, meaning “pledge” or “surety.” It likely passed into Old French as “gage” before evolving into the English “wage.” The word “wage” was used as early as the Middle Ages in England to describe compensation for work, often paid daily or weekly. In contrast, “salary” refers to employment where pay is fixed and regularly paid, usually monthly.

The word “salary” originates from the Latin salarium, derived from sal (salt), meaning “salt ration” given to soldiers or magistrates—that is, pay to purchase salt. Though “salary” is an ancient term widely used in the Western world, including Anglo-American and Latin countries, its meaning has shifted over time and place. In medieval Europe, “salary” appeared alongside many other terms referencing pay, but its meaning was vague, and there was no clear distinction between employment terms and pay forms (daily, flat-rate, etc.). Historical research shows that the modern sense of “salary”—regular payment from employer to worker—emerged only by the mid-18th century with the rise of industrial capitalism and labor discipline (Thompson 1967).

The term “salariat”^[2] arose even later in the mid-19th century (Beck et al. 2014). At this time, with the factory system’s development, large firms, and wage labor, and despite artisans’ resistance, “task-oriented” work paid by piece or task gradually shifted to work “measured by the clock.” Historian Thompson (Thompson 1967) details workers’ opposition to this shift. This resistance stemmed from the fact that piece or task-based pay had granted workers freedoms previously denied by daily pay, bringing them closer to self-employment. Resistance to “clock-measured” work thus reflects a struggle against the loss of autonomy introduced by factory discipline. Wage labor as heteronomous labor firmly took hold within large factories and capitalist firms, where factory walls and organizational boundaries defined the space and time of subordination and enabled worker control (Pillon and Vattin 2007). Marx’s unpublished sixth chapter of Capital Volume I analyzes this shift as moving from formal to real subsumption—capital no longer controlling labor externally but exercising direct control—marking the defining moment of capitalism’s specific labor form. The modern wage form corresponds to dependent labor pay in this era of real subsumption.

In France, “salaire” long referred only to production workers’ pay, with other terms (émoluments, traitements, gages, etc.) describing other socio-professional categories. For example, “appointement” specified white-collar workers’ pay. Today, “traitement” is still used for civil servants’ pay, roughly equivalent to “civil service salary” in the British system. Since the 1970s, “salaire” has more broadly denoted pay for all dependent work, although pay-setting differs substantially between civil servants—where individual qualifications guide pay (rank and seniority)—and private sector employees—where position qualifications dominate.

Pay for self-employed workers, which can’t be reduced to wages, differs. Self-employed income includes fees, professional income, commissions, or revenue. This difference is not just semantic but relates to the exchanged object. Roman law draws a distinction between locatio operis (contract for a work product) and locatio operarum (contract for labor services). The former is a contract of enterprise, the latter employment. Under locatio operis, exchange is for labor’s product, allowing workers autonomy in organizing and delivering their work. Under locatio operarum, the exchanged object is labor performance itself, and autonomy is formally lost with the employment contract and implied subordination.

Employee and Self-Employed

Within employment law, subordination is key to labor relations. In France and many European systems, whether a subordinate relationship exists between worker and employer legally defines the nature of their contract. Subordination, not economic dependence, is the judicial criterion differentiating employment from commercial contracts.

France’s 1931 Bardou ruling rejected economic dependence as the criterion, establishing the subordination link as essential to employment contracts. Judges identify subordination by factors such as salary payment, worker integration into employer organization, lack of economic risk borne by worker, employer-determined working hours, and employer ownership of production tools. The concept was clarified legally in the 1990s by the 1996 Société Générale ruling, defining subordination as “work performed under the authority of an employer who can give orders and instructions, monitor their execution, and sanction breaches.” This closely parallels the Anglo-American “right to control” test, where employer control signals an employment relationship. The 2000 Labanne ruling extended this, permitting contract reclassification based on worker dependence beyond strict subordination.

The distinction between salaried and self-employed work derives partly from how risks are allocated. Self-employed individuals bear social, professional, and economic risks alone. Salaried workers do not assume business risks and are protected against professional hazards (accidents, illnesses) and social risks (unemployment, retirement). The subordination relationship assigns risks to the employer, who provides protections in exchange for the employee’s submission.

Finally, subordination relationship has a dual role: it creates an asymmetrical power relationship between employer and employee and delineates the boundary between salaried and non-salaried work. The salaried worker is subordinate and dependent; the non-salaried worker is independent and unsubordinated. Countries like Canada, Italy, and Spain term the latter “autonomous.” This autonomy aligns, rightly or wrongly, with independence. In Anglo-American contexts, “self-employed” best captures this sociological and economic reality.

Though remuneration forms are major criteria distinguishing salaried from self-employed, historically overlapping pay types—like piecework, fixed-price, task- or time-based pay—blurred clear separation. For example, the payment for completed work positioned salaried employment along a continuum with self-employment (Saglio 2003). Since the 1980s, this distinction has become complex again. Dependent work pay structures have moved away from the 1950s–1980s salaried model based on monthly wages tied to contracted time and job classification. Variable and individualized pay components linked to performance have expanded, blurring the boundaries between dependent and self-employed statuses. In addition, peripheral remuneration methods (profit-sharing, incentives, savings plans) further complicate distinctions between labor income and capital income. Examining these changes in remuneration highlights the complexities of labor’s gray zones.

The Gray Zone as Descriptive Sociological Category

The notion of the “gray zone” explores a hypothesis: the loss—or at least significant weakening—of the heuristic power of binary conceptions of labor relations, namely waged employment versus self-employment. Notably, even during the so-called Fordist era of labor relations, hybrid contractual forms such as bargaining, task-based work, and subcontracting persisted in Western societies, providing clear examples of the multiplicity and overlap in employment relationships that a dualistic view—necessarily partial and even biased—cannot fully capture (Ricciardi 2019). It remains undeniable that over the course of the twentieth century, waged employment became the dominant form of labor relations in Western countries, while the number of non-waged workers declined both relatively and absolutely.

The crisis of the Fordist model and wage-earning society (Castel 2002) marked the start of a new phase in labor and employment relations. This crisis manifests in an ever-less distinct boundary between waged and non-waged work, reflecting a major transformation in the firm—understood as both an organization and an institution (Hannoun 2024)—as well as in management culture, ultimately leading to a reconfiguration of power relations in the workplace. More precisely, the weakening of subordination as a relevant criterion for distinguishing waged from non-waged work, combined with the hybridization (Azaïs 2019; Murgia 2025) of waged and non-waged worker figures, has prompted legal scholars to question the boundaries of employment status.

Should labor law’s scope be expanded to include figures with weak or poorly defined subordination ties under waged employment—for instance, through a presumption of salaried status—as has been the case in France since the 1960s for performing artists or as previewed in the 2024 agreement on the European directive project for platform workers? Or should commercial law’s perimeter be broadened instead? A different perspective, advanced by Italian jurists since the 1970s, has involved “recognizing the existence of a gray zone between independence and waged employment” (Supiot 2000, 142). Would the solution then be to create a third legal status? The answer is no, given that this involves not a third worker figure but a transformation of labor relations affecting both waged and non-waged work. As legal scholar Alain Supiot emphasized:

Le travailleur salarié n’est plus nécessairement un simple rouage dépourvu d’initiative dans une organisation fortement hiérarchisée. Et le travailleur indépendant n’est plus nécessairement un entrepreneur libre d’œuvrer comme bon lui semble. Le travail salarié fait place à ce qu’on peut appeler l’autonomie dans la subordination, tandis que réciproquement le travail non salarié s’est ouvert à ce qu’on peut appeler l’allégeance dans l’indépendance.^[3] (Supiot 2000, 133).

So, how should we define this “gray zone”? In the field of aeronautics, the expression “gray zone” refers to an area not covered by a radar beam. The gray zone would thus be a blind spot or dead angle that can be generated, in the realm of work, by the “decoherence” (Bureau and Dieuaide 2018) between work institutions and employment practices. It calls for institutional adjustment.

Another perspective is that outlined by geopolitics. Here, the expression “gray zone” takes on the meaning of a “lawless zone,” though interpretations differ. The debate among geopoliticians challenges the social sciences of work by raising a major question: are gray zones areas without law, without master or god, or rather zones multiplying with the dematerialization and diffusion of borders within states, lawless zones manufactured by state and supranational institutions? From this perspective, the first figures of gray zones are those of the immigrant worker, the undocumented migrant, the Dubliné (Montel 2021). But then, can the gray zone be considered a novelty in the history of work? The answer is resolutely negative if one considers Yann Moulier Boutang’s historicization of bridled wage labor (Moulier-Boutang 1998). The Fordist utopia could only function through the creation of exclusion zones, lawless zones populated notably by women, immigrant workers, and indigenous workers from the colonies. But, one might say, not everything is the same; the difference lies in the fragmentation and dissemination of these gray zones throughout global society. Understood as a lawless zone, the gray zone could then be a sociological category in which to inscribe figures on the margins of wage labor, precarious figures.

Gray Zone: A Concept in Power Theory

Quite far from the meaning given to it by both aeronautics and geopolitics, the expression “gray zone” becomes a true concept with Primo Levi. In his major work—The Drowned and the Saved. Forty Years after Auschwitz—he develops a theory of the unthinkable “banality of evil” that the Nazi concentration camps represented. It is more precisely in the second chapter of this work that Levi introduces us to the concept of the gray zone in discussing what he calls the hybrid class of prisoner-functionaries, a minority figure in the camps but a majority among survivors. The gray zone is defined as a non-empty space characterized by unclear boundaries; it both divides and unites the two groups of masters and slaves (Levi 2017). In Remnants of Auschwitz, philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes up the gray zone concept, this zone “where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim. A gray, incessant alchemy in which good and evil and, along with them, all the metals of traditional ethics reach their point of fusion” (Agamben 2002, 21).

For Primo Levi, as for Giorgio Agamben, it is not a question of moral judgment of these figures who populate the zone that separates and connects victims and executioners, but rather an effort to understand the multiple roots of collaboration. Primo Levi identifies two in particular: the wider the scope of power, the greater the need for auxiliaries; the greater and more unbearable the oppression, the greater the willingness of the oppressed to collaborate (Levi 1989). Thus, we need to understand the very necessity of this figure within the hierarchical structure of an authoritarian system, and at the same time, the techniques that enable the ‘manufacturing of the subjectivity’ of the prisoner-functionary. The concept of the gray zone is therefore first and foremost a political concept, as historian Anna Bravo points out, while simultaneously denouncing the trivialization of the concept through the widespread use of the expression gray zone (Bravo 2014).

Taking care to avoid the risk of trivialization should not deter us from daring to transpose the concept of the gray zone to contexts beyond those of Nazi concentration camps. Indeed, Primo Levi himself envisaged this possibility and even considered it a necessity. He suggested that if we want to understand the human species or the workings of a large industrial establishment, we should undertake the analysis of figures in gray zones everywhere (Levi 1989).

If we move from the world of concentration camps to the world of work in a large industrial plant organized according to the methods of the scientific organization of work, the figure of the foreman is certainly the one that conceptually comes closest to that of the prisoner-functionary, the figure of the privileged. The social ascent of the privileged throughout society is a phenomenon that Primo Levi found distressing but, at the same time, inescapable and fatal. This figure is absent, he said, only in utopias. Yet, as Anne Gillet points out, the sociology of work has shown little interest in this figure of the privileged, the foreman (Gillet 2011). However, as historians have taught us, studying the figure of the foreman can be of great heuristic interest in understanding how highly hierarchical and authoritarian forms of work organization function. The foreman, an ambivalent figure (Jarrige and Chalmin 2008) emerging from the rubble of craft workshops and associated with the birth of the Taylorian factory and a reconfiguration of authority (Vandecasteele 1990), embodies the complexity of labor relations and reflects the uncertainties of boundaries between social classes. In this sense, the foreman constitutes a prism through which to closely examine the nature of authority relations in the world of industrial work—relations marked by behaviors of both consent and resistance within a fundamentally asymmetrical subordination framework (Ricciardi 2016). The figure of the foreman, which is disappearing today, introduces us to the problem of the gray zone in labor relations after the crisis of the mass worker (a de-skilled worker subject to the scientific organization of work)^[4] and Fordist management.

The original thesis defended here is that the mutation of forms of labor remuneration does not so much respond to an economic necessity, but rather to a political strategy aimed at producing a gray zone, multiplying figures who occupy contradictory positions in class relations (Wright 2019), with the objective of reducing labor/capital conflict. It is therefore not a question of analyzing the remuneration of work in gray zones, but rather of seeing how the mutation of forms of remuneration can engender a gray zone in Levi’s sense. To make this point, it is worth recalling, in just a few lines, the political economy of wages or what wages represent in economic and sociological thought. Far from being a strictly economic question of monetary value, the question of wages involves social values, identity, and subjectivity.

The Economic Theory of Labor Compensation

From a political economy perspective, the notion of wages refers generically to the remuneration of labor. Wages are a price. More precisely, for the neoclassical economist, the wage is the price of labor conceived as a factor of production.

According to the marginalist theory of distribution, wages are determined by the productivity of the last unit of labor employed. Marginal productivity also determines the normal price of capital in a situation of free competition and free circulation of production factors. In this theoretical perspective, labor and capital are considered homogeneous from the point of view of their remuneration, since the same criterion determines their respective prices. The distribution of value between wages and profits—between labor and capital—is therefore both fair (because the determination criterion is the same) and efficient: under the assumption of free circulation, the factors of production (capital and labor) will move to where they are best remunerated, that is, where their productivity is greatest.

Classical political economy and the Marxian critique differ in their theoretical conception of the wage. Marx argued that in a capitalist market economy, wages are the price of a particular commodity, the only one capable of generating surplus (economic) value: labor power. Already among classical economists like David Ricardo, the idea existed that the distribution of value between wages and profits is antagonistic: if profits go up, wages fall. In a similar vein, in his early writings, Marx asserts that wages are determined by workers’ struggle against capital.

He introduces a distinction between labor and labor power. Labor is conceived as an activity that, under capitalism, aims at the valorization of capital rather than the satisfaction of needs. Labor power, on the other hand, refers to the subjectivity of the worker and must be understood as the potential for physical and mental engagement in work. Thus, according to Marx, capitalist exchange does not concern the product of labor—as was still the case in the putting-out system and remains so today for some self-employed workers, such as craftsmen—but labor power: a generic capacity for work placed at the disposal of capital for a certain period of time. In other words, in properly capitalist social formations, wages are a function of the length of time labor power is placed at the service of capital, that is, a function of working time. The “time wage” is thus the specific form of remuneration for labor power and the properly capitalist form of labor remuneration.

Still from Marx’s perspective, the exchange value of labor power—a commodity like no other—is determined by the labor required for its reproduction, the needs of this reproduction being historically determined. The difference between the use value and exchange value of labor power is the surplus value appropriated by capitalists in the form of profit and/or rent. If capital pushes wages down to subsistence levels, the price of labor power can deviate positively thanks to union action: wages are a function of the power relationship. This conclusion, in certain respects, inspires the sociological approach to wages.

In particular, the institutionalist approach conceives wages as a reflection of the power relationship. But from a sociological perspective, the wage is not just a question of economic value; it is the expression of confrontation around social values such as justice, equity, and objectivity: the “juste salaire” cannot be calculated; it must be negotiated (Saglio 2012).

Since the 1980s, New Keynesian economics has revisited wage theory by incorporating power relations and conflict to explain why wages often exceed marginal productivity. More interesting still, efficiency wage theory reverses the causal wage-productivity relationship: wages are no longer conceived as a function of productivity, but productivity is theorized as an increasing function of wages. In other words, wages are seen as an incentive: the promise of a higher wage can help retain employees and increase labor productivity.

From the same perspective, the individualization of remuneration on one hand, and forms of remuneration indexed to company results (profit-sharing, incentive schemes, etc.) on the other, can be analyzed as incentive devices that attenuate conflict over the distribution of added value. Changes in wage structures thereby create a “gray zone,” in Levi’s sense, within salaried work, where employee identity and subjectivity increasingly matter.

The Production of the Gray Zone in Salaried Work

Work-related exchanges involve not only a “market exchange”—money paid for work—but also a “social exchange” (Reynaud 1997). Rules help to share the risks involved in this exchange between the parties (Saglio 2003). These rules evolve over time and vary by location. Richard Biernacki (1995) identifies two models.

The first is the English textile company model from the 18th and 19th centuries, where pay was based on a share of sales. Here, workers bore the market risk—if sales dropped, wages were cut. The second is the German model, where workers receive wages regardless of sales, so the company assumes economic risk. Each model uniquely links the labor and product markets, creating different ways to share risk. The German model generally became dominant throughout the 20th century in most capitalist wage companies. However, these rules are never fixed; they shift with power dynamics and company policies aimed at motivating and retaining employees while minimizing conflicts.

Individualized pay raises, introduced in the 1970s, aimed to boost employee motivation and performance. Between 1985 and 2005, DARES^[5] conducted annual surveys showing a rise and then stabilization of individualized pay raises, with about two-thirds of raises being individual in the mid-2000s. By the early 2020s, DARES data from the ACEMO (Activité et conditions d’emploi de la main-d’œuvre) survey still showed a significant variable portion of labor compensation (around 20%), including bonuses that make up 13%, one-third of which are individual bonuses, now a key part of compensation.

Profit-sharing, introduced in France in 1959 and later institutionalized with employee saving plans in 1967 and mandatory participation in companies over 50 employees by 1990, links worker pay to company results. The idea of profit-based pay goes back to 19th-century debates focusing on aligning worker and capital interests and maximizing output through financial incentives (Leroy-Beaulieu 1870). More recent wage policies echo these goals, aiming to align interests while making pay more flexible and involving employees in company performance (Floquet et al. 2014).

From 2006 to 2020, the number of employees covered by profit-sharing schemes rose in absolute terms but remained stable relative to the workforce. Average payouts rose to nearly €2,500 but fluctuated with economic cycles, falling during the 2007 financial crisis and the 2020 health crisis^[6]. Profit-sharing converts part of workers’ pay into capital profits, creating a “gray zone” in labor relations. Workers receive both wages and a share of profits, sometimes wanting lower wages if it increases profits.

The U.S. pioneered broad profit-sharing and employee ownership, with France leading in Europe through institutionalized value-sharing (Batut and Rachiq 2021). Studies show profit-sharing correlates with higher productivity, especially when combined with employee ownership and participation in decisions (Doucouliagos et al. 2020). However, these benefits replace rather than add to wages and can reduce pay during downturns—shifting economic risk from shareholders to workers.

This mix of individualized wages and profit-sharing creates a complex “employee-capitalist” figure (Corsani 2013). Sociological studies reveal employees often identify closely with their companies, acting like owners, controlling colleagues, and overworking (Bernard 2020). As the sociologist Bernard Mottez wrote about the development of performance-based pay in large factories, as a mechanism for reconciling capital and labor, “it is not only because it allows the worker to earn more, but because it makes him share the same values as his employer.” (Mottez 1967, 10).

Various Forms of Remuneration for the Self-Employed

Among non-salaried workers, there exists a heterogeneous multitude of work forms where formal independence most often combines with real heteronomy, despite the absence of a legal employment relationship of subordination. These forms are most often precarious, subject to income discontinuity and unpredictability, and in borderline cases, unpaid. The notion of free work—free not in the sense of freedom but as unpaid—encompasses two very different realities from a subjective viewpoint (Armano and Murgia 2019).

In the first case, working for free stems from logics of giving, reciprocity, and/or social recognition. These are often volunteers, for whom not receiving payment makes the activity irreducible to the concept of work. This may resemble practices of “precarious workers by choice” who circumvent subjugation and exploitation (Cingolani 2014).

In the second case, accepting unpaid work may be a medium- to long-term strategy: working for free today is an investment in reputational capital, with the hope of gaining future professional status and regular pay. This is theorized as “hope labour” (Kuehn and Corrigan 2013) and the “political economy of promise” (Bascetta 2015).

However, there are other forms of free or poorly paid labor specific to platform capitalism, one of whose defining features is the penetration of work into the “intimacy of the subject” (Cingolani 2021, 125), thus extending work’s space-time into all aspects of everyday life. The rise of digital platforms has indeed been accompanied by the resurgence of new forms of task-based labor, characterized by degraded working conditions and low, discontinuous, and unpredictable pay.

In most cases, the platform worker cannot be compared either to the figure of the “sublime” or to that of the “proletaroid.” In the nineteenth century, the figure of the sublime resolutely opposed wage labor. Armed with his skills, the sublime agreed to work only for short periods, when he wished, and only for the employer he had chosen (Gazier 2003). The term “proletaroid,” first used by Werner Sombart, referred to workers in the lower strata. From a legal and organizational standpoint, the proletaroid, like the sublime, was the “master of his laborious life,” not subject to a boss or external commands over his work. This distinguished him from the salaried proletarian. However, like the proletarian, he remained subject to market pressures and was obliged to reproduce his labor power daily as a condition of survival. He was self-employed, but like the wage earner, he lived primarily from his labor. Economically, he received income as a provider of labor. Legally, he represented an ambiguous figure—both proletarian and self-employed (Corsani 2020).

In reality, these new proletaroids—the platform workers—are not truly the masters of their working lives, since they are subject to a time regime dictated by the platform itself. Platforms often offer very low-skilled jobs consisting of simple, repetitive computer tasks, such as transcribing text or verifying product lists, for which they place the entire global population in competition (Lallement 2024). These Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) must be completed within two hours of assignment, and compensation is extremely low (for example, eight cents to transcribe the text on a crumpled receipt). Consequently, platform workers receive neither stable pay nor social benefits, yet they are supposed to enjoy the autonomy associated with self-employment—namely, the ability to set their own schedules and negotiate their rates.

Beyond platform work, in more traditional sectors, quasi-free labor also persists. For example, in Mexico’s consumer services industry, the category of “subordinate workers without pay” (TSSS) reveals a form of remuneration reduced to tips given by customers. These workers—whether salespeople, waiters, or packers—operate under a double subordination: to the employer, who determines their working conditions, and to the customer, who decides whether the service deserves a tip, given that tipping remains optional. As a result, the TSSS must be particularly attentive in performing tasks and deeply devoted to customer satisfaction, even at the expense of personal dignity (Giglia 2019).

We are, therefore, in a gray zone—in the derivative sense of geopolitics—a “lawless zone” whose institutional, social, and political conditions are always specific to each context.

Compensation Assembled in a Zone of Resistance^[7]

In France, there exists a type of enterprise that occupies a space between salaried and self-employed work: the Coopérative d’activités et d’emploi (CAE)^[8]. This innovative cooperative model—representing a true institutional innovation—offers a home for project initiators by combining elements of a business incubator with programs designed to help unemployed individuals reintegrate into the workforce. The CAE functions simultaneously as a service provider, incubator, and wage portage company.

Any project owner may request support from a CAE. Once the project becomes viable and generates revenue, the entrepreneur can become a salaried employee of the CAE, assuming the status of entrepreneur-salarié. Later on, they may choose to leave the CAE and continue independently, or they may remain within it and become an ‘entrepreneur-salarié-associé’ (ESA)^[9]. Although each entrepreneur’s salary is individualized and based on the revenue they generate—after deducting contributions to the CAE’s shared budget and employer social security charges—they enjoy the same social rights as regular employees while maintaining full autonomy over their work.

Since the mid-1990s, when this concept first emerged, CAEs have evolved to pursue multiple objectives. Over time, they have grown increasingly complex, particularly after the creation of Coopaname in the Île-de-France region in 2004—a worker cooperative (SCOP – Société Coopérative Ouvrière de Production) that has experienced remarkable growth. Coopaname had become the largest CAE, with around 450 members. For Coopaname, the CAE’s role extends beyond providing security and support to entrepreneurs; it aims to function as a shared enterprise fostering an ecosystem where entrepreneurship is viewed as a collective, community-based endeavor composed of numerous ‘entrepreneur-employee-partners’. In this collective model, entrepreneurial functions are pooled, and individual projects are supported in a spirit of solidarity—creating what can be described as an “enterprise of enterprises.”

This new cooperative form was officially recognized by the French law of July 31, 2014, on the social and solidarity economy. According to Article 48 of this law, the ‘entrepreneur-employee-partner’ is considered an employee by assimilation^[10].

As entrepreneurs, these unique workers determine prices for their goods or services in relation to market standards and competitors. As employees, they pay themselves a salary based on revenue generated, after subtracting employer contributions and CAE overhead costs (such as payroll management, taxes, and the salaries of the ESA support staff). The ratio of this value to the minimum wage allows them to estimate a theoretical volume of working time, though this bears little relation to their actual hours worked. The entrepreneur-employee-partner therefore attempts to account for their real working time and to assign value to it in order to fine-tune their monthly salary.

Since the 2014 law incorporated the CAE and the ‘entrepreneur-employee-partner’ status into the French Labor Code, any reference to working hours has disappeared. The ESA’s gross annual income is managed to balance tax efficiency and social protection considerations. In this structure, the self-employed worker appears absorbed into wage labor as a calculating, maximizing “self-entrepreneurial” individual. The ESA thus embodies one of the most ambiguous figures in today’s labor relations: both a product of neoliberal wage-labor ideology and a utopian image of a post-wage society.

Formally, the ESA is a salaried employee, yet in economic, sociological, and political terms, they are neither wholly an employee nor self-employed. The entrepreneur-employee-partner represents a singular form—a refusal of both wage labor and self-employment—a figure of exile for the precarious (Cingolani 1986) and a form of resistance against the mechanisms that create “grey zones.” The institutional evolution of CAEs has helped to bridge, however imperfectly, the gap between institutional frameworks and real work practices. By mutualizing resources and creating shared enterprises, CAEs protect their members from falling into the “gray zones” often characterized as lawless spaces. Through cooperation as a political project, ESAs collectively resist the production of fragmented, contradictory subjectivities—the very essence of the “gray zone” in Primo Levi’s sense.

Conclusion

This paper argues that modes of remuneration function as powerful mechanisms of subject formation and, as such, can generate “gray zones.” Two primary conceptions of gray zones are relevant for analyzing new labor relations: first, as lawless spaces; and second, as areas of incoherence between institutional norms and real-world practices. Following Primo Levi, gray zones can also be understood as spaces where power operates differently—where disciplinary control over work recedes, giving rise to other, subtler forms of domination. Producing gray zones thus means creating conditions in which the traditional conflict between capital and labor weakens because subjectivity itself becomes obscured. The decline of the labor union movement can therefore be read as a consequence of the expansion of gray zones within wage labor.

​Resistance, though difficult, remains possible—it manifests through the rejection of both conventional wage labor and self-employment. In France, this form of resistance takes shape through cooperation. Yet cooperation faces contradictions in a world whose dominant epistemology and politics are rooted in individualism and competition—where linking pay to individual performance remains one of neoliberalism’s most effective tools.

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