How View of Work Shapes Law and Land

From 1803 until 1890, a French worker who wanted to change jobs had to carry a small booklet, the livret d'ouvrier. Each employer wrote in it the date the worker was hired and the date they left, and a worker could not lawfully be hired without one showing that the last employer had released them. A worker who still owed an advance on wages could find the debt written in the booklet, to be paid off by the next employer out of the next wages. Travelling without the booklet could be treated as vagrancy. The police could inspect it. A document that looked like a simple work history was in practice a leash, held jointly by the state and whichever employer had last signed it.

Nobody in Napoleonic France thought the livret strange, because nobody thought of work the way a free contract would require. A worker was understood to belong, for the time being, to a master, and a master was understood to answer for them. Once work is seen that way, a booklet controlling movement is not an imposition. It is just good order.

That is the subject of this essay. How people understand work decides which laws about work they find acceptable. And through the factory period and after it, the understanding drifted steadily toward one in which the business is responsible for its workers' private lives, their health, savings, housing, conduct, and eventually their bodies, as if the business were their owner.

Three ways of seeing work

Roughly, there are three ways to understand the relation between a person who works and the person or firm they work for.

Work as membership in a household. The older view. The worker is a servant, an apprentice, a journeyman living under the master's roof. The master feeds and lodges them, answers for their conduct, disciplines them, and is responsible to the community for them. In return the master directs not only their work but much of their life. This is status, in the sense of Henry Maine's observation in Ancient Law (1861) that the movement of progressive societies had been "from Status to Contract."

Work as a contract between independent parties. The worker sells a service, a day's labor or a finished piece, to a buyer, and both walk away when the deal is done. The buyer has no claim on the worker's evening, and the worker has no claim on the buyer's charity. Each answers for their own life.

Work as membership in an organization. The modern view, which grew up in the factory and the corporation. Formally the relation is a contract. In practice the firm is treated as a little society: it provides insurance, pensions, housing, training, and identity, and in return it is expected, and permitted, to govern conduct well beyond the job.

Each view makes a different body of law seem natural. The household view accepts laws that bind the worker to the master and make the master answer for the worker. The contract view accepts laws that enforce agreements and punish fraud, and little else. The organization view accepts laws that load the employer with public duties, and with the powers needed to carry them out.

The laws of the household

England's Statute of Artificers of 1563 is the household view written as national law. It required able-bodied people without property to work, fixed the standard hiring at a year, let justices of the peace set maximum wages, and made it an offense for a servant to leave before the term was up or for a master to dismiss one without cause. A servant in husbandry lived in the farmer's house, ate at the farmer's table, and was hired at an annual fair. The law treated the relation as a small, temporary family, and much of the law that followed made the master the servant's guardian in public matters too. Under the old poor law, a year's service in a parish was one of the ways a person gained a settlement there, the right to relief if they fell into need.

The household view did not die with the household. Britain's Master and Servant Act of 1823 made a worker's breach of contract a criminal offense punishable by up to three months of hard labor, while an employer's breach remained a civil matter. Thousands of workers a year were prosecuted under it into the 1860s, many of them factory and mine workers who had never lived under any master's roof. The law kept treating them as servants after the economy had stopped doing so. It took the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875 to make breach of an employment contract a civil matter on both sides.

The common law kept another relic: respondeat superior, the rule that a master answers for the wrongs a servant commits in the course of service. It made sense in a household, where the master really did direct the servant's every hour. Applied to a corporation and its employees, it has one effect that matters here. It gives every employer a strong reason to control what its employees do.

The factory as household

The factory concentrated hundreds and then thousands of workers in one place, and many factory owners responded not by treating them as independent sellers of labor but by rebuilding the household at a larger scale.

At New Lanark, the Scottish cotton mill Robert Owen managed from 1800, each worker had a "silent monitor" hung near their station: a small block of wood with four colored faces, turned each day to show the supervisor's judgment of that worker's conduct, from bad to excellent. Owen built schools, a store, and housing, banned drunkenness, and kept a book of character for every worker. Owen sincerely believed this was benevolence, and by the standards of the time it often was. It was also total supervision.

At Lowell, Massachusetts, the mills of the 1820s through 1840s recruited young women from New England farms and housed them in company boardinghouses with a ten o'clock curfew, rules against "improper conduct," and an expectation of regular church attendance. Workers who were dismissed for misconduct could find themselves on a list circulated to the other mills. The Lowell women understood what this was. In 1845 Sarah Bagley and others founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, and their writing used the language of the American Revolution, of independence and dependence, to argue that a worker who could be governed this way was not free.

The pattern repeated wherever industry grew. The company town, where the employer owned the houses, the store, the church, and sometimes the scrip that wages were paid in, appeared in the coal fields of Appalachia, the mill villages of the Carolinas, and the mining camps of the West. Britain had passed a Truck Act in 1831 against paying wages in goods or tokens, a sign of how common the practice already was. George Pullman's model town outside Chicago, founded in 1880, had clean streets, a library, and no saloons. When the company cut wages in 1894 without cutting rents, the result was one of the largest strikes in American history. In Britain, Lever Brothers built Port Sunlight in 1888 and Cadbury built Bournville in 1893. In Germany, Alfred Krupp built whole colonies of housing in Essen, with company schools, stores, and sickness funds, and told workers plainly to stay out of politics.

The high point of the factory household was Henry Ford's five-dollar day, announced in January 1914. Roughly half of that wage was paid as "profit sharing," and it was paid only to workers who qualified. To decide who qualified, Ford's Sociological Department sent investigators into workers' homes. They asked about savings and debts, checked whether the house was clean, whether the worker drank, whether married workers were living with their families, whether boarders were taken in, and whether immigrant workers were learning English. A worker who failed the inspection got the lower wage until they reformed.

None of this was required by law. It was the private version of the household view. But it set the expectation that the firm was where a worker's life could be governed, and the law soon followed.

The clock and the commute

The factory changed not only who governed the worker's life but when. Before it, most work was done at home or within sight of it. The farm family worked the fields around the house. Under the putting-out system, a merchant delivered wool or yarn to spinners and weavers who worked it in their cottages and were paid by the piece. The artisan's shop was the ground floor of the artisan's house, and the apprentices slept upstairs. Work and home were the same place, and the day was not divided between them.

E. P. Thompson described the older rhythm in a well-known essay of 1967 as task-orientation. People worked by the task, not the hour: the cow was milked when it needed milking, the hay brought in while the weather held, the piece finished by market day. Weavers often idled early in the week, keeping "Saint Monday," and worked through the night before the piece was due. The day mixed labor with meals, children, neighbors, and rest, and nobody thought of measuring it by a clock that belonged to someone else.

The factory needed everyone present at once, because the machines ran from one power source and stopped for no one. So it introduced the bell, the time clock, fines for lateness, and the shift. Thompson called it time-discipline. The worker's day was split in two: hours that belonged to the employer, spent at the employer's site, and hours that were the worker's own, spent somewhere else. As cities grew and the streetcar and railway let workers live farther from the mills, the line between the two halves became a physical journey, the commute. In 1817 Robert Owen gave the new arrangement its slogan: eight hours' labor, eight hours' recreation, eight hours' rest. The labor movement spent the next century fighting for it.

Law followed the clock. Hours laws and overtime rules, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, measure work by time spent on the employer's business. Zoning followed the commute. After the Supreme Court upheld comprehensive zoning in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty (1926), American cities divided themselves into districts where people lived and districts where people worked, and made it unlawful in many places to mix the two. Home occupation rules, which still limit what a person may do for money in their own house, are the residue of that division.

The separation had a double effect on the firm's claim over the worker. On one side, it gave the worker a boundary: the shift ended, the worker went home, and the employer's authority stopped at the factory gate. The Supreme Court leaned on that boundary in 2022 when it said that a vaccine, unlike a workplace rule, cannot be undone at the end of the workday. On the other side, everything described above, the company town, the home inspections, the insurance and the withholding, was an effort by the firm and the state to reach across the boundary into the half of the day the worker was supposed to own.

The important thing to notice is that the arrangement was temporary. The commute, the shift, and the separate spheres of work and home are about two centuries old. For most of human history, and for most people even in Europe until the nineteenth century, they did not exist. They were an artifact of a particular technology: power that had to be concentrated in one building, and machines too large and expensive for a household to own.

The firm as administrator of the state

In the twentieth century, governments discovered that the firm was the most convenient point at which to reach a working population. Instead of building their own relations with each citizen, they assigned public duties to employers.

Social insurance. Germany's sickness insurance law of 1883 required workers in industry to belong to a sickness fund, many of them organized through the employer, with employers paying a third of the contributions. Accident insurance followed in 1884, run by associations of employers, and old-age insurance in 1889. Bismarck intended the system to bind workers to the state and away from the socialists, and the employer was the binding point.

Health insurance. In the United States, the Stabilization Act of 1942 froze wages, but the War Labor Board allowed employers to compete for workers with fringe benefits. Health insurance was the obvious one, and the exclusion of employer-paid premiums from taxable income, settled in the tax code of 1954, made it permanent. A wartime workaround became the main way Americans got medical care. The Affordable Care Act later turned it into a duty, requiring large employers to offer coverage from 2015.

Tax collection. The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 made employers withhold income tax from every paycheck. One of the economists who helped design it was the young Milton Friedman, who later said in a memoir that it was a regret. Withholding made the employer the state's tax collector, and made the tax nearly invisible to the person paying it.

Immigration enforcement. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 required employers to verify every new hire's identity and right to work, using the I-9 form. The employer became an immigration officer.

Family law. Since the 1980s, federal law has required employers to withhold child support from wages on court order. The employer became an agent of the family court.

Pensions, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, disability accommodation, leave, harassment policy. Each assigned the employer a new part of the worker's welfare, and each was defensible on its own. Together they made the firm something close to what the household master was in 1563: the party that answers to the community for the worker's whole life.

The final step in this direction is the work unit of Mao's China, the danwei. In its developed form the danwei employed a person, housed them, fed them in its canteen, ran their children's school, distributed their ration coupons, kept their personnel file, issued the letter of introduction needed to travel, and approved, or refused, their marriage and their divorce. The Soviet Union had its own versions in the internal passport of 1932 and the labor book of 1938, which, like the French livret, recorded every job and followed the worker from place to place. These were the household view taken to its limit by a state that owned the firms.

Responsibility and control travel together

The lesson of this history is simple. Whatever the employer is made responsible for, the employer will be given, or will take, the power to control.

The household master answered for the servant's conduct, and so could discipline the servant. Ford paid for good conduct, and so inspected homes. An employer that pays for health insurance has an interest in employees' health, and American law now lets employers charge workers up to thirty percent more for coverage, or fifty percent for tobacco users, depending on whether they take part in "wellness programs" that track weight, blood pressure, and habits. An employer that answers in court for whatever its employees say and do has an interest in what they post online on their own time. An employer that verifies immigration status holds every worker's identity documents.

Each of these powers seems acceptable only because the responsibility came first. Nobody would accept a law letting a grocer inspect their blood pressure. Many people accept it from the company that pays their insurance premium, because they have come to see the firm as the place where their health is managed. The view of work came first. The law followed.

Health at work: the pandemic test

The COVID-19 pandemic showed how far this had gone.

When American and European governments wanted to change how people behaved during the pandemic, they reached for the employer before almost anything else. Employers were required, or strongly encouraged, to screen workers for symptoms at the door, take their temperatures, collect their test results, trace their contacts, send them home, and keep records of all of it. California's workplace safety agency adopted an emergency standard in November 2020 requiring employers to exclude exposed workers from work, notify coworkers of cases, and offer testing. California also passed laws presuming that a worker's COVID case was caught at work, for workers' compensation purposes, and requiring employers to notify public health authorities of outbreaks. The employer became a public health officer.

Then came vaccination. The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission advised in 2020 and 2021 that employers could generally require their workers to be vaccinated, subject to medical and religious accommodation, and many large private employers did. In November 2021 the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued an emergency standard requiring every employer with a hundred or more workers, covering some eighty-four million people, to require vaccination or weekly testing at the worker's expense. Separate rules required vaccination for federal contractors and for staff at health care facilities funded by Medicare and Medicaid.

The Supreme Court stayed the large-employer rule in National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA in January 2022. The majority's reasoning went to exactly the question this essay is about. OSHA's authority covered hazards of the workplace, the Court said, not the general risks of life that people carry into work and out of it again. A vaccine, it noted, cannot be undone at the end of the workday. The same day, in Biden v. Missouri, it allowed the health care facility rule to stand, since staff in a hospital do face a hazard tied to the work itself.

The line the Court drew is the line between the contract view and the organization view. Under the contract view, an employer can set the conditions of the job, and a hospital can require precautions against infecting its patients, because those are terms of the work. Under the organization view, the employer is the obvious agent for whatever the state wants done to the population, including a medical decision about a person's own body, because the employer is where the population can be reached. For a few months in 2021, most of the American and European public accepted the second view without noticing it was a view at all.

It is worth comparing how the same problem was handled a century earlier. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court upheld a Cambridge smallpox vaccination order. The order came from the city's board of health, it applied to residents, and the penalty for refusing was a five-dollar fine. Whatever one thinks of it, the rule ran through the town, the body that answers to residents for public health. It did not run through anyone's employer, and nobody's job depended on it. That the 2021 rules ran through the employer, and that firing was the penalty, is a measure of how much of public life had been loaded onto the firm in the meantime.

The pandemic also showed the cost of the organization view to the worker. A person whose health insurance, income, and often residence status depend on one employer cannot easily refuse an employer's rule about their body. The leverage that came with the employer's responsibilities was the same leverage the Lowell mill women objected to: the power of the party you depend on to set the terms of your private life.

Support for the firm, never for the person

There is a quieter side of the same view. Governments that load duties onto employers also like to help them. Every party claims to support private enterprise, and small business above all. Hardly anyone claims to support the individual who simply works, whether for wages or for themselves, as an economic actor in their own right. The firm is treated as a partner of the state. The individual is treated as someone the firm and the state look after.

The tax code shows it plainly. A business deducts what it spends to earn its income. An employee who pays out of pocket for tools, training, or travel needed for the job has been unable to deduct any of it since 2018. A business deducts what it pays for employees' health insurance, and the employee pays no tax on it. For most of the life of that rule, a person buying their own coverage paid with after-tax money. An employer's retirement plan lets a worker set aside more than three times as much each year as an individual retirement account does. A worker who goes out on their own as a sole proprietor pays both the employer's and the employee's share of payroll tax. A person who works from home may find that zoning rules on home occupations limit their customers, signs, and deliveries, or ban some trades outright. The same law that offers a small business a Small Business Administration loan requires a hair braider, a florist, or a tour guide in some states to buy a license before working alone.

The pandemic followed the same pattern. The largest American relief program for working people, the Paycheck Protection Program of 2020, lent roughly eight hundred billion dollars to businesses and forgave the loans if the businesses kept workers on the payroll. Help for the worker was routed through the employer, and came with the condition that the worker stay an employee. Sole proprietors and independent contractors were let in only after complaints, and on worse terms. In Germany the Kurzarbeit short-time work subsidy, and its equivalents across Europe, did the same: the state paid wages, but through the firm.

This is the organization view of work turned into policy. A firm is something the state can work with, because it keeps records, collects taxes, enforces rules, and can be held answerable. An individual is something to be managed, ideally inside a firm. Support goes to the party the state already relies on, and that makes the individual more dependent on the firm, which makes the firm more useful to the state. California's AB 5 fight belongs here too. Much of the case for reclassifying independent workers as employees was that, as employees, they would at last be reachable by the benefits and protections that the law delivers only through employers.

A policy that supported the individual would look different. Deductions would follow the person who bears the cost, not the corporate form. Insurance and retirement accounts would carry the same treatment whether bought through an employer or alone. The right to work for oneself, at home or on one's own account, would need no license except where real harm to customers is at stake. Relief in a crisis would go to people directly, whatever their employment status.

Work comes home

That technology is giving way. A computer and a network connection put the means of much production back within reach of a household, and the work can be done wherever the person is. Before 2020, perhaps one paid workday in twenty in the United States was worked from home. In the spring of 2020 it was about three in five, and after the pandemic it settled at around a quarter, by the estimates of the economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven Davis. Alongside remote employees there are freelancers selling services online, people selling goods they make through online shops, and people who combine several sources of income in a single day.

In many respects this is a return to something older. The person working from home on a task due at the end of the week, fitting it around meals, children, and errands, looks less like the factory hand and more like the cottage weaver working to the market day. Task-orientation is coming back. The household is again the place where work is done, as it was when the word "economy" was coined from the Greek for the management of a household. The economic historian Jan de Vries has argued that the household was the central unit of production in the "industrious revolution" that came before the industrial one. The network is restoring some of that.

The law has not caught up, because the law was written for the factory. Overtime rules measure hours at a time when output matters more. Zoning still treats a house where someone earns a living as a problem to be limited. Classification rules like California's AB 5 assume that a person who works regularly for a firm should be an employee on the factory model, when many people now want to work for several firms, or none, from home.

There is also a danger. If the household returns as the place of work while the organization view of work stays in place, the firm follows the worker home. The boundary the factory gate once provided is gone. Employers have adopted monitoring software that logs keystrokes, takes screenshots, tracks mouse movement, and in some cases watches through the webcam. Ford's investigators needed to knock on the door. The software is already inside. Whether the return to working at home becomes a return to independence or an extension of the firm into the last private place depends on which view of work the law adopts.

What gathers and what scatters

Every pattern of work decides what must be brought together and what can be left apart. The factory gathered people. It needed hundreds of bodies in one building at one hour, so it concentrated workers, housing, transit, and eventually offices in dense districts at the center of cities. What it scattered was little: the products went out, but the work came in.

The network reverses much of this. It scatters people. A designer, an accountant, or a programmer can work from a village as easily as from a tower, and the pandemic proved it at scale. The economists Arjun Ramani and Nicholas Bloom described a "donut effect": people and spending moved out of the centers of large American cities toward their suburbs and smaller towns, while office districts emptied. More than a third of downtown San Francisco's office space stood vacant by 2024. The commute, the downtown lunch counter, the central business district, and the transit spokes that served them were all products of the gathered workforce, and all are thinning.

But the network gathers other things, often more tightly than the factory ever did. Computing power concentrates in data centers, enormous buildings that draw as much electricity as a small city and cluster where power, water, and fiber meet; northern Virginia's Loudoun County has more of them than almost anywhere on earth. The training of large AI models is concentrated in a handful of companies. Marketplaces, app stores, payment networks, and identity systems tend toward one or two dominant platforms, because each is more useful the more people use it. Logistics gathers into regional fulfillment centers. The records of everyone's work, purchases, and messages gather onto the servers of a few firms.

So the new pattern is not simply decentralization. It is a shift in what is centralized: away from people and their daily presence, toward infrastructure, data, and the rules of the platforms where people meet. Work that once required obeying a foreman on a factory floor now requires keeping a rating on an app. The rating follows the worker from job to job within the platform, much as the livret d'ouvrier followed the French worker from employer to employer, and a platform that deactivates an account can end a livelihood without a hearing. The firm-as-master can return at a new level, as the platform-as-master.

This has consequences for law and land. Land values shift away from downtown towers toward the places where people now spend their working days, and a tax on land follows them automatically, while taxes tied to commuting, payroll, and central office districts do not. The fights over land use move from office parks to data centers and transmission lines. And the questions about the firm's power over the worker become questions about the platform's: whether a worker's reputation and records can be carried from one platform to another, whether deactivation requires a reason, and whether the infrastructure the new pattern depends on is open for anyone to build on or owned by one company that sets the terms.

The working principle is to decentralize what touches people's daily lives, where they live, when they work, how they travel, whom they work for, and to keep centralized only what genuinely has to be shared, while insisting that what is shared stays open, interoperable, and portable.

Transit law

The commute did not stay a private habit. It became the organizing assumption of a whole body of law, which can fairly be called transit law: the rules that decide how people may move, who must pay for their movement, and what kind of movement public money supports. Nearly all of it was written for the factory day, with one trip from home to a central workplace in the morning and one trip back at night.

The law draws the commute's boundary first. Under the federal Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, travel between home and work is not working time, and the employer owes nothing for it. The commute belongs to neither half of the day. It is a toll the worker pays, in time, for the separation of home from work.

Then the law hands the commute to the employer anyway. California shows how far this has gone. In 1987 the South Coast Air Quality Management District, covering Los Angeles and its neighbors, adopted Regulation XV, which required every employer with a hundred or more workers at a site to submit a plan for raising the number of employees per car on the trip to work, with a target ratio to meet and a coordinator to appoint. Its successor rule is still on the books. In 1992 California required employers that pay for employees' parking to offer cash in place of the space. In 2012 the legislature authorized the Bay Area's air and transportation agencies to require every employer with fifty or more workers in the region to offer a commuter benefit program, pre-tax transit passes or an employer-paid shuttle among the options. San Francisco had already required the same of employers with twenty. Each of these is the factory view in a new place: the firm made answerable for how its workers travel from their own homes, as the mill owner was answerable for their boardinghouse.

The firms took the hint. When large technology companies began running private buses from San Francisco neighborhoods to campuses forty miles south, the city spent years in conflict over them before setting up a commuter shuttle permit program in 2014. The private buses were the company town's streetcar reborn, with the firm carrying its workers door to door.

The public systems were shaped the same way. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which opened in 1972, was designed as a set of spokes converging on downtown San Francisco and downtown Oakland, to carry suburban commuters to office districts in the morning and home in the evening. Its fares, its schedules, and its station locations all assume that trip. So does the regional planning law built on top of it. California's Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, SB 375, requires each region to plan land use around its transportation network to cut driving, and the state's housing laws, most recently SB 79 in 2025, push dense housing toward major transit stops on the theory that the people who live there will ride to work. The geography of the factory day, homes at one end, workplaces at the other, the train between, has been written into state law.

When work came home, the assumption broke. Commuter ridership collapsed in 2020, and years later BART was still carrying well under half the riders it had before the pandemic, while the systems that served neighborhoods, errands, and trips at all hours recovered much better. The Bay Area's commuter systems now face deficits that the state has tried to cover with emergency loans and new regional taxes. The systems were built for a working day that a large share of riders no longer has.

The law also stands in the way of transit suited to the older and newer pattern. In 1914 and 1915 a craze for jitneys, private cars carrying passengers along fixed routes for a nickel, spread through American cities, Los Angeles among the first. Within a few years most cities had licensed, bonded, and regulated them out of existence, largely at the urging of the streetcar companies they were competing with, as the economists Ross Eckert and George Hilton documented. The jitney served the kind of trip a household economy makes: short, irregular, across town rather than into downtown, at any hour. California law still licenses shared-ride services tightly through the Public Utilities Commission, and the fight over whether app-based drivers are employees, the AB 5 and Proposition 22 fight, was in part a fight over whether the people providing this kind of transit must be organized on the factory model.

A transit law written for the more original form of work would start from the rider rather than the system. Today public money funds operators, mostly agencies running fixed routes on fixed schedules designed around the peak commute, and the rider takes what is offered. The alternative is to fund the trip: give riders vouchers, or fare credits, that they can spend with any qualified carrier, a public bus, a private van, a shared taxi, a bike or scooter service, a neighbor driving a carpool. The idea is not new. Federal transit demonstrations in the United States in the 1970s tested "user-side subsidies," letting elderly and disabled riders buy taxi rides at a discount, and found them cheaper per trip than dedicated services. In 2017 the town of Innisfil, Ontario, decided against starting a bus line and instead subsidized residents' rides through a ride-hailing app, paying part of the fare for trips anywhere in town. Funding that follows the rider lets service grow where people actually travel and shrink where they do not, without waiting for a planning agency to redraw its map.

The routes themselves should be allowed to follow decentralized patterns of use. Trips in a household economy run in every direction at every hour: to a client across town, a school, a shop, a co-working space, a parent's house. No central plan can anticipate them, but small operators responding to riders can find them. Hong Kong's public light buses, sixteen-seat minibuses, run thousands of trips a day, some on scheduled routes and some, the red ones, on routes and fares the operators set themselves. New York's dollar vans have carried riders through neighborhoods poorly served by the subway for decades, much of the time without a license. Across much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, shared minibuses and colectivos carry most of the people who ride anything. These systems are messy, and they need rules for safety and insurance. But they show that transit can emerge from use rather than be laid down in advance. A law that let it, licensing the vehicle and the driver rather than the route, and paying the rider rather than the agency, would also stop treating employers as the managers of their workers' travel, and stop planning housing on the assumption that the people living in it will travel to a central office every morning.

Three claims about work

The tension can be put as three claims, each attractive on its own:

1. Work is a free contract between a worker and an employer, either of whom can walk away.
2. The employer is responsible for the worker's welfare: health, income security, conduct, and compliance with public duties.
3. The worker's private life is their own: their body, home, habits, family, and opinions are outside the employer's reach.

Any two can be had, but not all three.

Hold the first two and the third falls. An employer free to hire and fire, and answerable for the worker's welfare, will choose and keep workers according to their private lives. Ford's Sociological Department was the logical result, and so are wellness surcharges.

Hold the second and third and the first falls. If the employer must carry the worker's welfare but may not look into their private life, the arrangement can only be held together by law fixing who must be hired, on what terms, at what cost. The relation stops being a contract and becomes a mandate.

Hold the first and third and the second falls. The worker sells work, the employer buys it, and each answers for their own life. The worker's health, savings, and insurance belong to the worker and to whatever associations they choose to join.

Where the welfare could go instead

The third combination seems harsh only because the alternatives have been forgotten. Before the welfare state, much of the security that employers and governments now provide came from associations the workers ran themselves. In Britain, friendly societies paid sickness and funeral benefits to millions of members; when the National Insurance Act of 1911 brought in state health insurance, it was administered largely through those same societies before gradually absorbing them. In the United States, as David Beito has documented, fraternal societies and lodges offered sickness benefits, life insurance, orphanages, and even hospitals, and by the early twentieth century something like a third of adult men belonged to one. These were organized by trade, neighborhood, ethnicity, or religion. They were portable: a member who changed employers kept their benefits.

Cooperatives are another answer. At Mondragón in the Basque Country, founded in 1956, the workers own the firms, so the question of whether the employer may govern the worker's life becomes a question the workers settle among themselves. That is self-government rather than paternalism, even when it decides some of the same things.

California is now fighting over this question in its own way. In 2019 the legislature passed AB 5, which pressed many independent contractors to be reclassified as employees, largely so that firms would carry their insurance, unemployment, and benefits. In 2020 voters passed Proposition 22, exempting app-based drivers. The argument on both sides was almost entirely about who should carry the worker's welfare. Very little of it asked whether the answer had to be an employer at all.

Living by the contract

A few principles follow from all this.

Keep the employer's duties tied to the work. An employer can rightly answer for workplace hazards, for what employees do on the job, and for paying what it promised. Beyond that, each new duty assigned to the firm is a new reason for the firm to govern the worker's life.

Do not use the firm as the state's agent. Tax collection, immigration control, family-court enforcement, and public health orders are public duties. Assigning them to employers makes them invisible to the public and turns every job into a checkpoint.

Make security portable. Insurance, savings, and benefits tied to a job make a worker dependent on that job. Tied to the person, or to associations the person chooses, they leave the worker free to leave.

Support the person, not only the firm. Whatever the law offers a business for working, it should offer an individual who works: the same deductions, the same tax treatment of insurance and savings, the same freedom to trade without permission.

Write work law for the task, not the factory clock. The shift, the commute, and the separation of home from work were a passing arrangement. Laws that measure work by hours on premises and zone livelihoods out of houses should give way to laws that let people work at home and by the task, without bringing the employer into the house with them.

Scatter what touches daily life; keep what is shared open. Let people live, work, and travel in dispersed patterns, and where the new economy concentrates infrastructure, platforms, and data, require that reputations and records be portable and that the shared layers stay open to all.

Build transit for the day people actually live. Fund riders rather than agencies, through vouchers or fare credits good with any qualified carrier. License vehicles and drivers, not routes, so that service can follow decentralized patterns of use across all hours and directions instead of a planned peak commute. And stop making employers answerable for how their workers get to work.

Watch the trade of responsibility for control. When a law makes someone answerable for another person's welfare, ask what power that person will need, and whether it would be acceptable on its own.

Thomas Jefferson worried, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that "dependance begets subservience and venality." The passage meant the dependence of laborers on customers and employers rather than on their own land, and drew from it a hope for a nation of independent farmers that did not survive the factory. The worry survived. Its modern form is the worker whose health, income, home, and standing in the law all pass through one employer. The law cannot make that worker free by adding more duties to the employer. It can only begin by taking some away.

Sources

• Law of 22 Germinal Year XI (1803) and the decree of 1 December 1803 on the livret d'ouvrier; law of 2 July 1890 abolishing it.
• Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (1861), ch. 5.
• Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. I c. 4 (1563).
• Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, eds., Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (2004).
• Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813) and The Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself (1857).
• Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (1979).
• Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (1967).
• Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (1981).
• Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1997).
• Melissa Thomasson, "From Sickness to Health: The Twentieth-Century Development of U.S. Health Insurance," Explorations in Economic History (2002).
• Milton and Rose Friedman, Two Lucky People (1998), on wartime withholding.
• David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967 (2000).
• Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).
• National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, OSHA, 595 U.S. 109 (2022).
• Biden v. Missouri, 595 U.S. 87 (2022).
• Cal/OSHA COVID-19 Prevention Emergency Temporary Standards (2020); California SB 1159 and AB 685 (2020).
• California AB 5 (2019) and Proposition 22 (2020).
• Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (2020), Paycheck Protection Program; Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), § 67(g).
• Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Query XIX.
• E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past & Present 38 (1967).
• Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (1962).
• Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926).
• Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
• Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (2008).
• Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, "Why Working from Home Will Stick," NBER Working Paper 28731 (2021).
• Arjun Ramani and Nicholas Bloom, "The Donut Effect of COVID-19 on Cities," NBER Working Paper 28876 (2021).
• Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, 29 U.S.C. § 254.
• South Coast Air Quality Management District, Regulation XV (1987) and Rule 2202.
• California Health and Safety Code § 43845 (parking cash-out, 1992).
• California SB 1339 (2012), Bay Area Commuter Benefits Program; San Francisco Commuter Benefits Ordinance (2009).
• San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Commuter Shuttle Program (2014).
• California SB 375 (2008) and SB 79 (2025).
• Urban Mass Transportation Administration, Service and Methods Demonstration Program reports on user-side subsidies (late 1970s).
• Town of Innisfil, Ontario, Innisfil Transit (2017).
• Hong Kong Transport Department, public light bus regulation.
• Ross D. Eckert and George W. Hilton, "The Jitneys," Journal of Law and Economics 15 (1972).

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A note on how this piece was written: the subject, the questions it asks, and the positions it takes are mine. Much of the research, the examples, and the sentences were drafted by an AI model working from that direction, and then edited by hand. I'd rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.