The goods (and bads) of self-employment

Self-employment, which accounts for one in seven workers in OECD countries, has ceased to decline in recent decades and is now growing in these countries.1 It comprises shop owners, restaurateurs, consultants, lawyers, and an increasing number of unskilled workers in industries like construction and transportation, in which self-employment was unusual in the past.2 Yet these workers, the vast majority of whom do not employ others, have meagre access to social protection. In some countries, the self-employed are legally excluded from unemployment, sickness, and occupational injury benefits—the three areas of social protection that, retirement pensions aside, self-employed workers value most.3 And in other countries they become de facto excluded because, despite having statutory access to these benefits, the eligibility requirements to accrue them are tailored to waged work.4 Unprotected exposure to social risks makes self-employed workers, on average, three times more likely to become income-poor than their salaried peers.5

Over recent years, the working conditions and social protection of the self-employed have gained ground in public policy debates. A growing consensus exists among practitioners and policy-makers on the importance of strengthening the social protection of the self-employed in four ways. One is to offer them unemployment benefits in order to protect them from poverty in the event of bankruptcy. Another is to secure them access to insurance for occupational diseases and injuries. The third is to grant them adequate protection from day one in case of sickness. The fourth and final way is to give them access to benefits and measures that allow for a better work–life balance, including maternity, paternity, and caregiver leave. Moreover, as part of the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights, the European Commission has recently put forward a proposal that encourages EU member states to offer adequate social coverage to self-employed workers.6

The debate over these measures, however, has lacked normative input thus far. Even though self-employment was a central concern for pre-industrial thinkers like James Harrington, Adam Smith, and Thomas Paine, who conceived of it as an alternative to the ‘servile dependency’ that waged work involved, recent philosophers have largely overlooked it.7 The burgeoning philosophical analyses of work have paid scant attention to the nature and value of self-employment, nor to the normative significance that the distinction between self-employment and employee work may have for the legal and social protection that self-employed and waged workers are due.

This neglect may be explained by the tendency in recent philosophy to embrace a corporatist paradigm of working relations—a paradigm that equates work with employment, usually in large firms, and neglects self-employment and other non-standard forms of work. This is clearly true of philosophers working in the Marxist tradition, who conceive of workers as a class of waged earners compelled to sell their labour force to capitalists.8 But it is also true of neo-republican philosophers, who typically focus on the domination to which workers may be subject under the managerial authority of their employers,9 and of liberal egalitarians, who have recently centred their attention on how subordination to an employer may be compatible with the basic liberties of employees.10

The corporatist paradigm has two serious limitations. First, it sits uneasily with the reality of existing labour markets, in which standard employment coexists with a growing myriad of non-standard forms of work, including self-employed, gig, and multi-party work. Second, it is blind to pressing moral questions that fall outside the scope of standard employment relationships, such as the moral obligations that firms might have towards independent contractors, the self-exploitation of mom-and-pop owners that may result from market competition, the risks that algorithmic management may impose on gig workers, and the protection that informal self-employed workers in poor economies may deserve. These problems affect a substantial portion of the global labour force, and they are not bound to fade away. It is time for the corporatist paradigm, then, to give way to a non-wage-centred view of work: one that appropriately accounts for self-employment and other forms of non-standard work.

This article takes some first steps in this direction by focusing on the moral significance of self-employment. It seeks to explore the extent to which self-employed work may offer adequate opportunities to realize goods traditionally associated with waged work. Identifying such goods has become central to the debates over what makes (waged) work decent or meaningful, and worthy of protection as a result—with scholars and policy-makers offering a diversity of views of the pecuniary and non-pecuniary goods that work may deliver. For example, whereas economists tend to focus on earnings and benefits,11 sociologists and philosophers often centre on the non-economic dimensions of work, including autonomy, self-realization, and socialization.12 Such goods operate, in these analyses, as normative standards for assessing different work arrangements. Inspecting whether self-employed work may also realize them is critical, then, to assessing whether self-employment merits protection—without prejudice to the independent reasons we may have to protect it. If, for example, self-employment happens to deliver such goods, then we may have pro tanto reasons, whose stringency will depend on how successfully self-employment delivers them relative to employee work, to improve access to protection for the self-employed, making it easier for those with a preference for self-employment to go solo as a result.

The article proceeds as follows. After offering a two-dimensional account of self-employment in Section II, the remainder of the article examines the link between self-employment and three of the core goods of work: autonomy, self-realization, and self-provision. Sections III and IV inspect the non-pecuniary goods of autonomy and self-realization, respectively. Work may no doubt provide a wider range of non-pecuniary goods—for example, it may often improve health, marriage prospects, and family stability compared to joblessness. Yet the reason for focusing on autonomy and self-realization is not just that these are among the core goods of work, as their salience in philosophical and sociological analyses suggests. It is also that they encompass other narrower goods—such as self-direction and self-sufficiency in the case of autonomy, and social contribution and recognition in the case of self-realization—which loom large, given their significance, in recent scholarly and political debates on the value of work. Section V turns to a pecuniary good: the economic capacity to fend for oneself and one's family—or self-provision, as I label it—in an attempt to capture what is normatively significant about earnings.

The conclusions I draw, albeit tentative, favour improving the social protection of the self-employed. I first argue that self-employed workers are both less and more autonomous, as it were, than those who work for an employer, as self-employment may sometimes lessen the off-duty autonomy that people acquire through work. Yet it significantly increases workers’ autonomy within work. And I also argue that self-employment, although unnecessary for attaining self-realization and self-provision, is distinctively useful for securing each of these goods, under plausible, far from outlandish, conditions.

Before proceeding, two caveats are in order. First, the arguments I develop here do not entail that self-employment should be promoted, in the sense that workers should be conditioned or induced to develop a preference for self-employed work.13 They rather seek to show that, under actual circumstances, yet also under an wide range of neighbouring ones, some individuals have reasons to engage in independent work, and that this decision deserves adequate social protection, so that those with a preference for self-employment have suitable opportunities to realize this preference without incurring unbearable risks.

Second, although the arguments I develop apply both to the self-employed who work on their own and to those who employ others, it is worth teasing these two categories apart. For one thing, improving the social protection of solo self-employed workers (that is, those who have no employees) has greater urgency. This is not only because solo self-employed workers account for more than three quarters of the self-employed,14 it is also, and chiefly, because they are in a more precarious situation, in terms of earnings, financial security, and job stability, than self-employed employers. For another thing, social contributions, which are the counterpart of social benefits, tend to be higher in the case of self-employed employers, who are usually among the high-earning self-employed.15 Whom we should prioritize among the self-employed, and how we should fund their benefits, are questions to be addressed separately, once we have answered the question of whether the social protection of the self-employed merits improvement.

The concept of self-employment is not neat. The definitions we find in our legal systems lack the consistency of those of waged or employee work. Take, for example, the 1993 International Classification of Status in Employment (ICSE-93), which the International Labour Organization has long endorsed. According to this classification, which is the standard that national statistical systems still most widely use, the self-employed are those workers who are not compensated with a salary. They instead work for profit, in the sense that their income directly depends on the revenue that their productive activity may generate, being more exposed to market risks than waged workers as a result. Compare, for example, the self-employed owner of a beer garden, who will lose her clientele and make no money on a rainy day, with her employed waiters, who will take home a day's wage despite having spent the day sitting on their hands.

Yet an exclusive focus on the for-profit dimension of work, which the ICSE-93 exemplifies by limiting the self-employed to the residual group of workers who do not earn a wage, is insufficiently discriminating. It misclassifies a number of workers who, although working for profit, have much in common with wage labourers. One example of this misclassification is that of dependent contractors, who provide goods and services for a single client with whom they have a commercial agreement. Another example is that of contributing family members who work without a contract in family businesses run by the head of the family. Like employees, these workers are under the authority of someone else—the single client or the head of the family—who restricts their autonomy in many aspects of their work.

A more nuanced definition of self-employment, which the International Labor Organization's (ILO) 2018 update of the International Classification of Status in Employment (ICSE-18) incorporates, considers a second dimension as well—namely, that of independence. According to the updated definition, a major difference between self-employed and employed workers is that the self-employed, unlike employees, are not subordinated to the authority of a boss. Self-employed workers are free to decide basic aspects of their work, such as when, how, and with whom to work, whereas employees are not. This is a definition that is increasingly used in various jurisdictions to reclassify bogus self-employed workers as employees, and to extend certain employee rights, like sick pay and paid holidays, to dependent contractors on the grounds that, despite their being legally classified as self-employed, they lack autonomy in how to run their businesses, as well as the authority to hire and dismiss staff.16

Considering these two dimensions—profit and independence—we can define genuine self-employed workers as those who earn their income by engaging in independent productive activity at their own risk.17 This allows us to distinguish the self-employed both from standard wage workers, who engage in dependent work for a salary, and from intermediate categories that sit uneasily between self-employment and waged work. These categories do not only include the above-mentioned cases of dependent contractors and contributing family members. They also include employers who, despite earning a salary from their own business, are independent enough to have a work experience that is closer to that of their self-employed peers. And they also include members of worker cooperatives who, despite having collective ownership and control of their business, are subordinated to the authority of the management of the cooperative, and enjoy less individual control over their working conditions than self-employed workers do.18

As an initial exploration of the nature and value of self-employment, this article sets aside the complexities that borderline cases, such as those of dependent and bogus self-employment, may pose. It rather focuses on whether, and on what grounds, the decision to engage in genuine self-employment deserves better protection than it currently has. In order to address this issue, the next three sections examine the value of self-employment as a vehicle for attaining three core goods of work: those of autonomy, self-realization, and self-provision. As noted above, these goods may not cover the full gamut of goods that can make work valuable. Yet it is hardly controversial that their absence entails serious work deficiencies, such that if, for example, self-employment happens to poorly secure them, it then becomes inimical to good work—and the reasons to protect it accordingly diminish in stringency.

Analyses of autonomy at work tend to focus on the extent to which workers exercise self-direction or control over their working conditions, including their schedule, tasks, and workload. Karl Marx famously diagnosed the alienation of the proletariat on the grounds that the capitalist division of labour dispossesses workers of control over production.19 And Max Weber warned of the impact that the bureaucratization of economic activities and organizations could have on workers’ control over their jobs.20 These analyses home in on workers’ degree of autonomy while at work. But the significance of autonomy at work is also prior and subsequent to work performance. It is prior because the decision to take one particular job instead of another can be more or less autonomous. And it is subsequent because one of the rewards of work is the off-hours autonomy that we may acquire through it. This section inspects the extent to which self-employment may foster or stifle these three dimensions: (a) autonomy within work, (b) autonomy in one's choice of work, and (c) autonomy through work.21 As we will see, the self-employed are more autonomous than their salaried peers in some, yet not all, of these dimensions.

One reason why people enjoy working, when they do so, is that it brings self-realization, which I shall now analyse. Before inspecting the ways in which self-employment may be conducive to self-realization, however, let me briefly consider why work, unlike other neighbouring activities, offers a privileged context for accessing it.

An activity is a potential source of self-realization if it has two central features.47 First, it involves the exercise and development of valuable skills and capacities that people choose to develop. Second, its execution lends itself to positive appraisal by others. Thus, private activities that involve the development of chosen capacities in a way that is not public, such as training one's ability to enjoy wine, may lead to gratifying experiences of consumption, but not to self-realization proper.48 Call these two requirements the self-development condition and the social recognition condition, respectively.

Work is an important vehicle for self-realization because it often meets these two conditions.49 It requires developing valuable skills and abilities, like hand–eye coordination skills, with the purpose of producing goods and services that others value, like fixing patients’ heart valves or installing hardwood floors. To be sure, certain forms of leisure and personal interactions can also meet the two required conditions. For example, some may achieve self-realization by cooking risotto for friends, or by playing the trombone in amateur jazz bands. But work is special in this respect, in two senses. The first is that developing skills takes up a lot of time, and most of us spend half of our waking time at work. This makes self-realization through hobbies and other activities more difficult and less likely to occur.50

The second sense in which work is special is that it offers, when paid, a particular kind of affirmation of our contribution to the well-being of others. Each market exchange can be portrayed, Adam Smith noted, as ‘give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want’.51 When others are willing to pay for what we produce, they recognize us as someone who makes a valuable contribution to them, which furnishes us with a unique sense of being valued.52 This is not to say, of course, that markets are faultless in this respect. Existing markets often undercompensate, or fail to compensate altogether, some valuable contributions, such as care work and scientific research—hence the need, many argue, to publicly fund such activities. And, conversely, the market often rewards telemarketing, brand management, and other ‘bullshit jobs’, as David Graeber labelled them,53 which nobody, not even those who perform them, finds valuable. But the fact remains that people convey, through their spending choices, how much they are willing to sacrifice to acquire a particular good or service and, in so doing, they signal, as imperfectly as it may be, a positive valuation.54

Of course, not all paid work leads to self-realization. Much work does not meet the self-development condition either because of its content—for example, assembly-line work that leaves little room for self-direction and skill-development—or because of its conditions—for example, short-term contracts that give workers little time to acquire and develop skills. And there is also work that fails to meet the social recognition condition because its compensation is low, which may signal, sometimes inaccurately, that its social value is likewise low. Moreover, some work, as in the cases of the bullshit jobs just mentioned, fails to meet both the self-development condition and the social recognition condition.55

But how does self-employment bear, we may wonder, on the conditions for self-realization? Take the case of someone who wants to develop good hair-cutting skills and become a hairdresser. What matters for her self-realization is that she has opportunities for making a living from cutting people's hair. And for that, some may argue, owning her own beauty salon seems unnecessary, as she could always get a job as an employed hairdresser. This argument is unsound, however, as it ignores the fact that some work preferences are easier to satisfy when ample opportunities for self-employment are available. This can happen for various reasons, some more dependent on labour market contingencies and others less so.

Let us start with reasons that depend on market contingencies. One such reason is that, in certain industries, opportunities for waged work may be scarce—or scarcer than opportunities for self-employment in any event. For example, given that openings to work as a translator are often scarce, freelancing offers would-be translators opportunities to develop their skills and elicit appreciation for their work. Another reason is the greater freedom that self-employment often offers to pursue specific projects. For example, in countries where self-employed workers’ scarce social protection makes opening a hairdressing salon too risky for most, a would-be hairdresser may be able to work as an employed hairdresser. But if she wants to be a dreadlock hairdresser, then she is at the mercy of whether her employer also sees dreadlock hairdressing as good business. If her employer does not, then opening her own salon may be the easiest option for her to self-realize. Neither of these two kinds of reason establish, to repeat, that self-employment is necessary for self-realization, as they hinge on contingent facts about existing markets. What they establish at most is that, given how resilient some of these facts are, self-employment is highly useful for some people to achieve self-realization under existing and modally nearby circumstances.56

Other reasons, however, are less dependent on market contingencies, as there may be something about working for oneself that makes it distinctively apt, independently of market eventualities, for self-realization. Consider Tomasi's famous example of Amy, a college dropout with a job as a pet groomer who manages to start, through hard work and savings, her own business.57 Although Amy still spends her days catering to the bathing and grooming needs of pets, she is now the proud owner of her shop. Each time she goes home, after a long day of work, she is delighted to read her name up on the sign: Amy's Pup-in-the-Tub. Tomasi does not elaborate further on this example. Yet he prompts us to think about what this new status means for Amy, and how it may bear on the two requirements of self-realization—those of self-development and social recognition—introduced above.

Let us take self-development first. Does self-employment require specific skills? After all, an important part of Amy's working day consists in bathing and grooming pets, just as she did as an employed groomer. Yet, as the owner of her shop, she also has to keep the books, publicize the shop, direct employees, and teach the craft to apprentices, among countless other tasks. Running her own shop comes with an individualized responsibility for its success, and although some may prefer to delegate such responsibility, others may welcome it. In sum, Amy has good reasons, virtue ethicists could say, for wanting to develop and exercise her entrepreneurial skills.

On this view, the disposition to seek mutual benefit in the market is likely to foster market virtues.58 Two such virtues are imagination and alertness to others’ needs, both of which are needed to meet existing demand. ‘Every manufacturer knows and feels’, W. S. Jevons reckoned, ‘how closely he must anticipate the tastes and needs of his customers: his whole success depends on it’.59 A third virtue is trustworthiness—or ‘probity’, as Adam Smith calls it.60 Given that commercial transactions depend on trust, building a reputation as reliable and honest may lead, in the long run, to higher gains than giving, as Smith notes, ‘any ground for suspicion’.61 Whether or not she is motivated by the pursuit of these virtues, Amy may value her entrepreneurial skills just as much as her grooming skills, and this is where the significance of being able to develop both lies.

Let us consider social recognition next. Does self-employment entail a closer connection between one's work and others’ appreciation of it? Compare a worker in a high-end shoe company, where she cuts the leather that co-workers later use to make moccasins, with an artisan who produces moccasins herself. Assuming that both types of moccasins sell similarly well, making the two workers similarly believe that their contributions are valuable, many would nonetheless share the intuition that the artisan has further grounds to see in consumers’ choices an appraisal of her work.

For one thing, the artisan may have greater proximity to her consumers if they are able, for example, to purchase the shoes at her atelier, conveying their satisfaction directly to her. The employed worker, by contrast, has no interaction with the customers, who may not even recognize her as the producer of what they buy. It is true, of course, that the employees working for the artisan at the atelier have no less proximity to customers than the artisan herself does. But the artisan still has greater control over the final product, including which colours and types of stitching to use, which results in a tighter link between her work and what consumers buy. The artisan's employees may contribute decisively to the final product. Yet the shoes that the atelier sells are, in a relevant sense, the artisan's shoes—an intuition that can be partly explained by the connection between proximity and control. The artisan's closeness to her customers offers her first-hand information about their preferences, which informs the decisions she may make about the features of the shoes she produces. The upshot is a stark contrast both with the employees at the atelier, who have proximity but lack final control over which colours or stitching to use, and with the employees in the shoe factory, who lack both proximity and control.

In sum, opportunities for self-employment may be crucial for the self-realization of those who (a) have preferences for occupations that the labour market, because jobs in such industries are scarce, cannot meet, or (b) have preferences for developing specific skills that are best fostered by independent work. But self-employment may be unsuitable, it should also be noted, for people whose self-realization hinges on socializing and cooperating with others towards a joint goal,62 or on developing skills that require the supervision that characterizes waged work, such as building bridges or playing in an orchestra.63

Self-provision figures prominently among the goods of work. It is a central dimension of the right to work, which in its formulation as a human right seeks to ensure that everyone has ‘the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts’,64 and that every worker has ‘just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity’.65 Thus, low-income work that fails to secure self-provision is a serious injustice, which governments address using measures such as minimum-wage laws. To be sure, not everyone has to work in order to survive. Some can sit on their inheritance, or rely on their rents, and do nothing. Yet paid work offers the most reliable means to make a living for most. When opportunities for remunerative work are scarce, economic and life prospects become grim.

Self-employment is vital, as a matter of fact, for the creation of work opportunities and to ensure self-provision. In affluent countries, solo self-employment and work in small firms, which self-employed workers usually start and run, account for 57 per cent of total employment. And in low- and middle-income countries, this share is much larger, approaching nearly 100 per cent of the labour force in many countries in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.66 Policy-makers often agree that supporting self-employment and small businesses should be a core strategy of economic development.67 There are two cases in which self-employment opportunities are particularly relevant.

The first case concerns contexts in which employee work opportunities are scarce. In developed economies, economic crises often drive workers into self-employment to avoid joblessness.68 In less-developed economies, by contrast, job scarcity is the norm, with millions of workers, including three-quarters of the workforce in Africa and two-thirds in South Asia,69 being pushed into informal self-employment due to a lack of job opportunities.70 Moreover, the weak enforcement of labour standards often means that the few jobs that are available involve poor and risky working conditions, such as serious health and safety hazards, unreasonable schedules, and meagre wages. Self-employment, then, offers a way out of destitution without having to endure the risky and precarious conditions of employee work.71

The second case concerns the disadvantages that specific groups, like immigrants and workers with disabilities, may endure in the labour market. For example, the opportunities and economic prospects of native citizens and immigrants, empirical studies suggest, are unevenly allocated, with immigrants more likely to be unemployed or poorly paid.72 This gap often results from discriminatory practices.73 Even when such practices are properly addressed, though, factors such as lack of skills and poor knowledge of the local language and local labour markets often limits the supply of well-paying jobs available to immigrants, rendering self-employment a good alternative for making ends meet.74 Workers with disabilities, meanwhile, often turn to self-employment not only as a result of employer discrimination,75 but also because it offers the best way to accommodate their special needs, to which employers are rarely sensitive enough.76

Consider two objections, however. The first admits that self-employment and small businesses account for the lion's share of existing jobs, but argues that waged work in larger firms is preferable, and should be fostered instead, because it provides better livelihoods. This is so because, among other things, small firms display higher rates of job destruction.77 They have lower productivity levels, which result in lower salaries—between 20 and 30 per cent lower, according to the ILO.78 And they display much higher incidences of health problems and occupational accidents, with fatal injuries being up to eight times more likely in small firms than in large ones.79 Small is not necessarily beautiful. Instead of subsidizing self-employment, so the objection goes, we should concentrate our limited resources on creating more opportunities for employment in large firms, including opportunities for disadvantaged groups.

Note, however, that the argument from self-provision is non-ideal. It assumes certain features that our economies presently have, and are likely to have in neighbouring circumstances—including the costs that transitioning to an economy with full employment in large firms may involve. In developed economies, for example, one of the factors that hinder firm growth is the costs of specific labour regulations that large firms have to conform to, such as the obligation to create works councils, appoint union representatives, and establish health and safety committees.80 Removing or loosening up these regulations so as to foster job creation would entail throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as the higher quality of jobs in large firms is partly a consequence of such legislation. Governments can certainly incentivize firm growth by alternative means, such as lower interest rates, tax incentives, and friendly trade policies. But none of these offers a fast track to full employment in large firms.

Things are even more complicated in developing economies, where a meagre 6 per cent of the workforce is employed in big firms. The rest work in small firms or are self-employed.81 The immediate challenge in these countries is to create enough employment opportunities to absorb the young labour force entering the labour market. In Africa, for example, where the working-age population is expected to grow by 450 million people by 2035, only 100 million new workers are expected to find a stable job under current trends.82 Fostering employment in large firms would require addressing the financial, bureaucratic, and corruption challenges that often hamper firm growth—and concerning which developing economies have a long way to go.83 Yet even on more optimistic assumptions, work in small firms and self-employment are likely to remain the only way to make a livelihood, at least in the short and medium run, for a sizable portion of the labour force in such economies. Efforts to expand employment in large firms have to be combined, in sum, with policies to improve the working conditions of the self-employed and those working in small firms.84 Focusing on the former and ignoring the latter, as the objection suggests, does a disservice to the working prospects of millions under the non-ideal actual circumstances of our economies, particularly the less-developed ones.

The second objection is more general. It seeks to weaken the link between paid work and self-provision by pointing to alternative means for securing everyone's livelihood. The provision of a basic income is a case in point. Although we are not nearly close to adopting it, many welfare states already ensure a minimum income to all those unable to find a job. And some forecasts about the automation of jobs paint an optimistic picture—one with fewer work opportunities, yet more prosperity.

The above considerations about the non-ideal character of the self-provision argument apply here, too. Yet there are two additional considerations worth pointing out. One is that securing a social minimum only allows people to have a decent life without having to work if not everybody takes this option. Given that the social minimum must be funded somehow, some will have to engage in productive activities capable of generating enough economic surplus.85 Robotization and automation may be able to reduce how many are needed for this. But it is hard to imagine that labour supply can ever become entirely dispensable, which prompts serious concerns of fairness and reciprocity.

The second consideration allows me to introduce an important reason why self-provision is more valuable than state provision. As some have argued, it is in everyone's interest to be able to connect one's instrumental agency and the satisfaction of one's needs—or, to put it more simply, to progress by one's own efforts.86 There is a distinctive kind of self-esteem that looking after ourselves and our dear ones elicits. Think, for example, of dependent homemakers who, after proudly finding a job, no longer have to rely on their spouses for every expense they may have. Or think of industrious teenagers who, thanks to their summer jobs, can happily buy themselves a treat. Unearned incomes, whether provided by the state or by a breadwinning spouse, deprive people of the subjective sense of dignity that self-provision prompts.87 And self-employment, when effectively protected and accessible at bearable cost, offers opportunities for self-provision and the dignified experience that comes with it.

There is a growing consensus among policy-makers on the importance of improving self-employed workers’ social protection, including unemployment, sickness, and occupational injuries benefits, as well as maternity, paternity, and caregiver leave. In this article, I have offered normative grounds for this consensus that stem from the link between self-employment and various basic goods of work. I have offered three arguments in particular. First, self-employment provides a greater degree of autonomy within work than waged work does, for it allows workers to avoid managerial authority and its pernicious effects on workers’ control over their working conditions. Second, self-employment is highly useful for the self-realization of certain workers—namely, those who want to develop specific skills that independent work more effectively fosters and those who seek to work in industries in which employee work opportunities are scarce. Third, self-employment is also vital, and often the only option, for securing self-provision in contexts in which salaried jobs are scarce and labour market discrimination rampant.

These reasons need to be carefully weighed, of course, against competing considerations of justice that may also be relevant for public policy debates. When governments improve the protection of the self-employed, they make it easier for people to engage in independent work, and this can cause small businesses to proliferate, which can be concerning from the standpoints of labour justice and distributive justice. Concerns of labour justice may arise because, as mentioned earlier, working conditions in small businesses tend to be worse than in larger ones. In particular, employees in small firms are more likely to endure physical and verbal abuse, inappropriate firings, and other forms of arbitrary management. Concerns of distributive justice, on the other hand, may stem from the fact that self-employed businesses display less productivity and lower profit margins than large firms. For this reason, if the former become predominant, the surplus available for improving the position of the worst-off may diminish.

The short reply, which I will seek to expand in a separate article, is that such concerns of labour justice and distributive justice need not decisively override my conclusions here. But let me suggest, in closing, two lines of argument worth exploring. The first looks into the responsibilities to their employees that the self-employed who are also employers have. Improving the social protection of self-employed workers need not be at odds with enacting and enforcing labour legislation that prevents them from using their greater autonomy to unduly restrict their employees’ autonomy. The second suggests that a diminished surplus need not be unjust as long as it suffices for adequately securing the basic needs of the worst-off. If, on the contrary, we were to regard any reduction of the surplus value as unjust, we would be assuming a maximalist duty of justice that would make us condemn any policy that fails to make the worst-off as wealthy as possible, which seems unreasonable.88 Whether these arguments are successful, so that we can reconcile the social protection of self-employed work with the demands that labour justice and distributive justice may generate, is in any event a question for further research.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Tilburg, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Oxford, and Pompeu Fabra University. I thank the audiences at these occasions and, in particular, Siba Harb, Tom Parr, and Zosia Stemplowska, for their comments. I owe special thanks to Iñigo González Ricoy for his very detailed feedback on several versions of the article, and to an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions.

Research for this article was supported by project PGC2018-095917-A-I00, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science.

There are no potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

The author declares human ethics approval was not needed for this study.