Why Uber Drivers Keep Driving, And Why I Won't Take a Job
The Allure of Autonomy at Work
Like most people, I’ve spent much of my life moving through institutions, some better than others, but all limiting what I could do in remarkable ways. Primary school involved standing in line a lot, constantly being told to be quiet, all kinds of “discipline” and then an aftercare programme that wouldn’t let me read my beloved books because “it’s craft time”. Middle school involved weirdly specific dress codes, lectures on how one must not have sex! until marriage! Plus an amazing amount of rigorous multiple-choice testing (no pens allowed!). High school involved a ton of pressure to take as many classes and do as much else as possible, where any misstep was, we were told, likely to ruin our lives. (Also! No drinking!) College meant older adults living in our hallways to surveil us and police our drug habits (though weirdly no longer our sex habits), all while we were assigned to share a bedroom with strangers.
Look, I’m a huge nerd; I loved so much of my education. And I made amazing friends. But also, I would never go back and do any of that ever again.
Absolutely not.
In 2018, I ceased to be a full-time employee. I was going to start a PhD, so I reasonably figured I shouldn’t work too much during that time. But in practice, because living through a pandemic and massive ongoing cost of living crisis is expensive, and also because I am a lifelong masochistic workaholic, I continued to work my *&^% off, freelancing for my livelihood in Oxford and London. I’m still at it today, post PhD: scooping up work with interesting clients and renting a tiny sloping office space above a charming Dalston café.
When people ask me if I’ll ever seek full-time employment, I never even hesitate. No, don’t think so. Probably not.
Absolutely not.
There are a lot of reasons I haven’t even considered being an employee again. But the biggest one is simply a stubborn emotional attachment, which turns out to be very common: I really, really like my autonomy. My entire career has been a series of exceptional privileges, which I feel both grateful for and guilty about. But this one, this ability to work “for myself”, I find myself clinging to most tightly.
This isn’t entirely universal, of course. I know some people like being a traditional employee more than others. But for me, to use a highly academic term, it sucked. I commuted, without exceptions nearly, for years in London and it was an hour each way at least for many of those years. The first year I got sick every three weeks with something awful, probably from combined office-and-commuting germs that I wasn’t yet immune to. I distinctly remember being so sick I had to cab home (and to stop the cab to vomit outside) and then lie in bed for several days until my flatmate worried whether I was alive.
The various lurgies aside, I lived with a recurrent lowkey day-to-day anxiety that came, in large part, from the knowledge that other people were keeping tabs and that I could lose my livelihood without their ongoing approval. It was this dread that got me out of bed and on the contagious crowded trains year after year, and that kept me up after hours refreshing my work emails. This is part of the shared psychology of all workers, whether they’re scrubbing floors or delivering powerpoints. They must be constantly conscious of being observed and, ultimately, controlled. We were all, for example, aware of the strong panopticon-inducing norm that unless you were in the office, no one could be truly sure you were working (this has changed now, at least for many, or at least been replaced with the Slack-message-timely-response-test). Even if you were working hard in the office, you also had to perform looking busy. We all worried about being even a few minutes late from lunch… We all knew that discipline, of the external rather than internal kind, was still very much a possibility and did our best to avoid encountering it.
Before I appear as a mere whiny Marxist with a bone to pick, let me be clear: mine was a pretty reasonable work environment! I loved the actual work, at least a lot of the time. Also, in many ways, it was a warm and nurturing environment, with truly excellent people around and more flexibility than many other places. My bosses certainly did not invent the idea of the office, and they did not enforce HR policies for their own sadistic pleasure. (I think they found the job of doing so a bit embarrassing for everyone, actually).
No, my point in listing this sort of water cooler-complainer-chat is to point out that even in reasonable workplaces, work has long been like this. This is what employment has traditionally meant, even in the best of circumstances.
I had many managers in my 20s, and while a few were truly incredible (shoutout to the lovely Caroline!), a few were also accidental micromanagers and I had to expend a ton of energy constantly relaying back what I was doing. A small minority didn’t seem to get it no matter what I said, which felt incredibly demoralising. How could I trust them to direct the hours of my life when they didn’t see the value of my toil? I was regularly made to do things I didn’t think made sense, in ways I found less than optimal. (As you can tell, I was probably quite annoying to manage). Sometimes what I was doing didn’t seem meaningful at all.
And again, in the scheme of things, this was a relatively meaningful job!
Also, my life was under the control of my workplace even when I was not at work, as is generally the case. I had to ask the higher-ups if I could go to America to see my family, and when. I had to ask them if I could go to the doctor. I had to try to make sure I seemed sick enough to stay home when I was sick. (Should I have sent them pictures of the vomit? No, no … But I did send them pictures of any delayed trains, anxiously.)
Again, ours was an alright place to work! Some people left for other companies and then returned. Plus I lived in Europe, after all—at least until Brexit. Five weeks of vacation starting at age 22. We were lucky...
And yet.
When I finally went freelance, I felt anxiety, absolutely, but also immense relief.1 Most of all, it felt like I had a lot more control, month to month and year to year, over the direction of my life. Over my working life itself, to start with: if I didn’t like something I could stop without it being a crisis, a major administrative project to find a new job, or a disaster. If I wanted to develop a skill I could more easily maneuver into a task where I’d learn it. I could negotiate out of doing things I didn’t really like, especially management of others, which generally felt weird and which also prevented me ever getting down to work myself. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that finally the direction of my days and my life was in my own hands, not bent and formed to meet the needs of higher management.
This was partially an illusion, I think, like the illusion that Uber drivers have as their console tempts them with another customer. Consider, for example, how the company, whose drivers as all self-employed, uses design and cognitive science to keep them working longer, for less, by dangling the rewards and emphasising that it is their choice what to do in the last instance:
To keep drivers on the road, the company has exploited some people’s tendency to set earnings goals — alerting them that they are ever so close to hitting a precious target when they try to log off. It has even concocted an algorithm similar to a Netflix feature that automatically loads the next program, which many experts believe encourages binge-watching. In Uber’s case, this means sending drivers their next fare opportunity before their current ride is even over.
And most of this happens without giving off a whiff of coercion.
“We show drivers areas of high demand or incentivize them to drive more,” said Michael Amodeo, an Uber spokesman. “But any driver can stop work literally at the tap of a button — the decision whether or not to drive is 100 percent theirs.”
Autonomy, or even the feeling of it, can be addictive. The way the Uber software/consoles work, pursuing one’s “100 percent” own choices is addictive, in the same way video games are. The above-cited New York Times piece on Uber’s tactics notes that the interface uses all the same techniques as a video game, including that sense that one’s goals are just within reach, known as the “ludic loop”: “a feeling of progress toward a goal that is always just beyond the player’s grasp.” Ironically, while we might get a thrill from feeling we’re making all the calls ourselves in situations like this, that psychological system of rewards actually somewhat overrides one’s self-control (in the same way that a Netflix programme can get you to watch just one more episode by queueing it up before the last episode is quite over: you don’t stop as you said you would, because you’re already anticipating the next reward). The thrill of a fake autonomy occludes the higher forms of choice. The rush of choosing “next” obscures the ways we are seduced into working ever more, often for less.
This is, arguably, something built in to all freelance work, as there is no clear upper limit on it and one can take on what one likes. But soon enough, in ways subtle and less subtle, it may be further “built in” to the work we do for companies: as the Times notes, “the company’s example illustrates that pulling psychological levers may eventually become the reigning approach to managing the American worker.” Clients and recruitment agencies alike have good reason to employ the same kind of tactics.
In some ways, although the nature of my labour was different, my newfound “autonomy” was similar to being an Uber driver. The rush of finding work was much sharper, the pride about a completed piece greater, the sense it was all my own choices that brought me somewhere somehow itself highly rewarding, at least in the short run. And, unlike when I was an employee, it always felt like any given tomorrow a new big thing could happen to me. All this despite the fact that, at the end of the day, practically freelancing generally just meant I simply had several clients, instead of one boss.
Still. It felt incredible.
“Independent Workers”
Of course, this piece isn’t really about me and my bohemian-chic middle-class wage slavery. It’s about all of us, the world we work in and the way it’s going. Because in the last few decades, more and more people have done what I did and left traditional employment for self-employment. And they have done so, in large part, because of how it psychologically feels.
There’s a report that comes out nearly every year called the MBO Partners “State of Independence” report, and it has nothing to do with governments. It’s about “independent workers”, the term the study uses for really any kind of freelancers. Each year, the study measures how many workers are “independent” or self-employed in the US, from gig economy workers to people who effectively run their own small businesses. The report examines these independent workers’ views about working life in detail.
Their reports have long shown that the percentage of people working as “independent workers” has been rising steadily for some time. This year it’s 24%. More interestingly, perhaps, the majority of the people involved are doing it entirely by choice: 63%. And another 23% are doing it at least partially by choice.2 It’s not a simple tale of people who want a steady job being pushed into something else. This has been a growing trend for years:
The number of Full-Time Independents has also significantly grown, increasing by 20% in 2023, reaching 26 million. The growth since prior to the pandemic is even greater, up 73% since 2019. This is a substantial increase in the growth rate for Full-Time Independent workers, which averaged just 2% between 2011 and 2019.
In five years’ time, it’s estimated that the percentage of independent workers in the US will be at about 33%.There is no one single reason for this rise. It is overdetermined, and includes the following:
employers liking to hire contractors because it is cheaper/they can terminate jobs whenever
employers liking to rent smaller or no offices and give fewer other benefits
employees hate commuting, and more generally want flexibility, especially now that it’s incredibly hard to find childcare
people want to work less! Contractor flexibility and sometimes-elevated day rates let some workers have an unquestioned four- or even three-day working week.
older folks have increasingly opted into contractor work as a way to keep earning as they age without having a full time job
various labour market weaknesses, where the self-employed essentially form a reserve of available labour, a less-dire version of Marx’s lumpenproletariat
so many other things.
Before I go on—this particular report, which I refer to a decent amount below, is not an entirely “neutral” report. MBO partners are a sort of agency for independent workers, especially elite ones, and therefore not an objective entity. I can’t be sure they haven’t skewed the data somehow; it is at minimum in their interest to play up this trend each year and make it seem like a good thing overall. Nevertheless, their data aligns fairly neatly with many other reports that do not have this kind of commission or motivation, and which I will also reference in this post.
So let’s see what all this data and some psychological research might say about freelance life, and more broadly our increasing psychological and cultural drive towards having some form of autonomy at work, whatever that might mean.
People Crave Autonomy
To be human is to want some form of autonomy.3 Whenever I see a small child insist on doing it themselves, I smile because there it is, the fundamental need for autonomy, the one in all the psych literature! (Again, I’m a nerd). The theme returns over and over again in my research and readings in cognitive science.4 I was genuinely a little astonished by this as I dug deeper into cognitive science over the years, because I’ve rarely seen it referenced by anyone writing about politics. And yet, there it is, again and again; it comes up in every field: in studies about medicine, studies about work, studies about childhood, even studies about how people deceive themselves and thus ironically impede their own possible freedoms. In my own research on cognitive dissonance, people often jump to rationalise their behaviour as something they chose, even when it was circumstantially thrust on them, in order to maintain the feeling that they have autonomy. They assume they must have chosen something rather than acknowledge something unpleasant has happened to them—with sometimes dire political consequences when it comes to all kinds of oppression.
It makes sense that we crave autonomy this intensely. Our drive for it helps us survive and adapt continuously to the surrounding world. Without autonomy, how can we really learn and grow? If others do for us, we do not get to do for ourselves, learn for ourselves, relate to others as ourselves. Without autonomy, how can we escape certain kinds of harm? How can we get certain things we want? For that matter: how can we really know what we want, no matter how well-intentioned the people around us?
It’s probably due to this drive, which is as with many things partially cultural and partially “built-in”, that so many forces in our social world appeal to our desire for “freedom”, from government propaganda to car advertisements. The title of the MBO report is “The State of Independence,” and that is, in a way, what they grandly ask the reader to consider via the medium of branded corporate whitepaper. It isn’t very far from “The Declaration of Independence”. These things ring nicely in the ears. Liberty and freedom for all.
All this psychological research often makes me think that centrist and right-wing theorists have done a much better job of appealing to people’s drive for autonomy and freedom at work, and even in life, than most lefty theorists have. Libertarians and enthusiastic capitalists often sell a vision of self-determination that I think is neither plausible nor ethical (e.g. bootstrapping your way to the top, crushing the competition, etc), but nevertheless in its own way appealing. It is a powerful motivating force for all humans, one with still-untapped potential.
Under capitalism we may have certain kinds of autonomy. But nearly all of us are decidedly not free from one thing in particular: the need to work for pay. And when we do go to work, it turns out, it matters hugely whether we feel we have any control and self-determination.
People With Autonomy at Work Are Happier and Healthier. (People Without It Want It Very Much.)
In fact, there’s a mountain of evidence that autonomy for workers, even really basic autonomy, like some choice over how to approach a challenge or what your hours are, makes people a lot happier.5 So much happier that they are, for better and worse, often willing to give up pay to get it. The MBO report notes “70% of independents said, ‘doing something I like is more important than making the most money’, while 70% said, ‘flexibility is more important than making the most money’.” The same report even shows independent workers are more optimistic than traditional workers.
Of course, there are some caveats here, as always in the murky fields of social science. It’s probably the case that people who would anyway be a bit better off and happier also end up being people who get to have nicely flexible independent jobs. They are the people who felt confident enough to do this, and often they are those who had the human capital to bargain in a more open market. But given all the data we have on how allowing for more flexibility massively improves wellbeing of people even when they’re in full-time employment, it’s likely that causation also runs directly from having more autonomy to wellbeing and happiness. Research shows that full-time employees’ happiness is in large part of function of their degree of autonomy, so that autonomy matters a great deal even if you haven’t chosen to be/ended up as an independent worker. And even pessimistic takes on self-employment tend to consistently report this trend. For example, even this gloomier UK report where the self-employed earn less than their full-time-employee counterparts and seem to have chosen their work status less freely, still shows higher wellbeing levels for the self-employed, which is really something.6
What does autonomy really mean, in this case? As currently measured, it’s mostly about having some say over what we get paid to do and choice over when and how to do it. In the 2019 MBO partners report, 79% of independent workers said they had control over when and how they worked, compared to just 24% of employees. And 57% of independent workers said they had interesting work, compared to just 37% of employees. Choosing when, how, and what work to do seems to be crucial to our wellbeing.
Not just our psychological wellbeing, by the way. It affects our physical health and our lifespan itself. The famous Whitehall Study looked at the health outcomes of civil servants while controlling for various factors like diet and exercise.7 It found that higher-status employees were much less likely to die from coronary problems than low-status ones. In other words, having status at work and the ability to choose how to handle the problems that arise seems to literally cause people to live longer. One particularly prominent theory about this set of studies is that while higher-status employees probably experience more decision-making-related stress, they can make decisions as needed and thus escape that stress state, while lower-status employees cannot do this and also cannot control their environment, so they essentially bathe in harmful uncertainty and stress hormones for much longer periods of time.
All this citing of research can sound rather corporate itself, like an ad for a certain kind of slightly-less-horrible workplace, perhaps conceding the terms of what we should seek from the start. It would be fair to ask: am I really here arguing in favour of a good life involving “workplace autonomy” and “workplace engagement”? Shouldn’t we be enjoying fully-automated luxury communism instead? Should this sort of thing even matter to me, as a lefty political theorist by training?
But it did matter to me, and immensely, as a worker. It felt incredibly important to be able to work for myself. It still feels that way now. This is true even though it was and is as much a psychological need as anything else, that is, it was about what it feels like to be me rather than what things are like from a material or power-relations or societal, birds-eye view. For all I know, sure: I might genuinely be better off being employed by many places that would offer me a job. They might actually owe me more rights. I might have an easier time being a parent, should that happen to me in the future. My friendships would be less commodified, as I’d need less to network with and through my social world. I might earn more. I might even progress further and learn more interesting things. I’d certainly have a nicer office.
But. If there’s one story to tell about the matter, personally, I think it’s simply this: I had already been through nursery and kindergarten and elementary school, through middle school and high school and university, and here I was, still filling out employee health and safety forms and struggling to show up bright-faced every morning on time. In my 20s, I went to work for a relatively flexible and understanding place, one where we all talked about our feelings pretty openly (at least relatively so, given that most employees were British). And I was still surprised to see how work controls peoples’ lives. When I saw the conditions for the folks in big corporations we consulted for, boy was I extra-surprised! It all made me wonder: when was the free part of my life supposed to be,? The “Sunday scaries” are, I think, primarily about this feeling: that some important implied period of freedom and self-realisation is never actually going to arrive, at least not till retirement, by which time we’ll be rather less able to enjoy it.
I suspect I am not alone; I suspect many people grow up and then are disappointed to find just how much their lives are still run, day-to-day, by others.
This is not to suggest there aren’t many individual variations on this. Some people don’t mind others controlling their schedules so much. This too can be rational. Freedom can lie elsewhere. And also, interestingly, even when people like autonomy, they like it differently. Gender, perhaps unsurprisingly, seems to play a major role in why people choose independent work. In multiple studies (e.g. both the MBO and Birmingham studies), women tend to value flexibility for care work reasons, and men value things like “being my own boss.” Women, in other words, like being one degree less stretched by the classic “second shift”, and men like the vision of autonomy that many right-wing utopias seem to offer, where one is king of the castle and an entrepreneur.8
But in short, female, male, British, or otherwise, I suspect many people feel over-controlled, first in childhood and then at work. We grow up, but we don’t quite get grow out of other people telling us what to do. We wind up in the office for most of our lives and long for something we’ve never quite experienced, might never get, and maybe even can’t get enough of.9
Autonomy vs. Security, and Autonomy as a form of Security
Okay, but why is this complicated source of angst causing a massive social change now?
Traditionally, many people have seen their working lives, and to some degree their lives as a whole, as involving a fundamental trade-off between autonomy and security. Go freelance, it used to be thought, or change jobs too often even, and you’ll gain some autonomy, but you’ll miss out on the security of a pension, a promotion, and/or a long term position as a loyal, trusted, valued employee within a company.
But now, jobs rarely offer as many benefits, there are fewer full time gigs going around, and even if a company seems to offer both, many people in my generation, who have seen several financial crises within our lifetime, don’t trust that such a position will last. We know the world is too uncertain to rely on a job for security.
Of course, given how unstable the world is it might intuitively seem that economic security would be more of a priority right now.10 But that doesn’t necessarily follow. Sometimes when people despair of ever attaining one thing, like security, they simply double down on whatever they can get outside it.11 This is a relatively rational behavior. Focus on what you can get, not the one thing you can’t have. (It’s also probably combined with a bit of the fallacy of sour grapes, the “*&^$ that thing anyway” feeling about something you can’t have, which is related to what I have long studied, cognitive dissonance.)
If you can’t have security, might as well try to stock up on autonomy (and for that matter, other related goods that become more achievable instead when you can no longer “sell out” as effectively: creative work, work for a good cause, or simply free time and not working all together…) When most of us in my generation in the West will be poorer and less stable than our parents, being more autonomous may be one of the few ways we can aspire to do better than they did.
It’s perhaps not surprising that as younger generations in some studies increasingly distrust the capitalist system, they’re also less invested in trying to “win” in it, and more interested in trying to navigate it in a way that feels less oppressive, or at least more bearable. And even if we think there is some form of security to be had in terms of one’s working life, workers increasingly think it comes not from any single institution, government, or job, but from diversifying risk.12 So the autonomy/security trade-off is only one aspect of what I’m arguing; the other of course is that security comes in a new form for people in this economy.
This graph, which shows independent work is increasingly seen as more secure than traditional work, is telling, especially since later data in the same report shows that about a quarter of these same workers do worry about, say, benefits or where their next big project will come from. Despite that, they feel more secure as “independent” workers:
Developing a charming personal brand and a wide portfolio of clients may seem a safer bet than a full time job (if you can manage it, anyway). Working across a number of industries may feel safer, especially for less “skilled” jobs.13
In any case, I suggest that, in part because they can’t attain professional security in its traditional format, many people value autonomy via self-employment more than ever. The logic might essentially work like this: since nothing an employer can offer me will ever really mean security, given what I’ve seen of the world and in my own and my friends’ lives, I’ll give up on that and pursue other things instead, including and especially autonomy. And I’ll make whatever security I can get my own way.
We should probably all feel ambivalent about, well, all of this.
On the one hand, in condensed form: neoliberalism bad (sorry not sorry to P, my lovely neoliberal reader). Social atomisation also bad. Social atrophy bad, and more common perhaps if you don’t have a stable office full of colleagues. Short-contract work also bad for worker’s rights and ability to unionise.
On the other hand, even very basic increased autonomy with regard to our working lives is, well, kinda good.
And this, I think, brings us back to the central challenge and contradiction in the rise in self-employed working. Because if my continuous reading of social science and cognitive has brought up anything as a repeated theme, it’s that people tend to cling to and preserve their sense of autonomy and agency even when the sliver of autonomy they’ve been given is relatively minor. Often, that is all that is on offer in independent work. After all, choosing when to pick up the next Uber passenger is sort of addictive, but realistically you’re still doing the work, and often it’s not that fun or well-paid. (Some of the Uber drivers profiled in the piece are in debt for doing that work). Perhaps in a job like mine you can try to bargain for this or that set of responsibilities, but you can’t bargain your way out of the grand instability of our increasingly precarious economy.
I want people to have it all at work, the union security and the flexible schedule, the control over their lunch break and ownership of the means of production, or at least shares of the company. One day maybe it will happen. But for now, some people are choosing long lunch breaks and variable hours because they can’t have the security and broader control. And, here as elsewhere, although our drive to autonomy is a wonderful, hope-inducing thing about human beings, it can also be something that traps us. Giving people a small amount of apparent agency is in fact a great way to keep them going, and in some ways to prevent wider revolt. When I read stats like “In 2023, 80% of independent workers said they always wanted to be their own boss, and some 71% of independent workers say they don't like answering to a boss.” I simultaneously empathise completely and also I wonder if this is really the best way for people to imagine their liberation. We might be overly satisfied with crumbs as “independent workers”. After all, we all still have to work and, well:
The wealthiest folks are making more off us as we do it, and giving less back to us, their workers, “independent” or otherwise, than they used to.
What if there’s another, more directly political form of control that we all lack but which is harder for us all to psychologically recognise or crave? What if control over our schedule is nice but in some ways also a security blanket that we grip as we face a wider set of things we cannot control, like climate change, economic breakdown and our own mortality? Surely I’m not the only one who obsessively calendarises and controls the small things not despite, but precisely because, I can’t control the big ones?
Having my small-c control over my work isn’t going to help me have any form of influence over these big things. Absolutely not.
For now, autonomy at work remains an ongoing conundrum that HR professionals struggle with as they seek to recruit, hire, and retain people, especially generation Z, who are, if anything, even more autonomy-loving and pessimistic than this blog. I know this because some of the businesses thinking through this problem are also my clients, and I get to see it up close. Sometimes I even get called in as a consultant and asked what should be done about it. Now that many employees, especially white-collar ones, have worked remotely during the pandemic, without anyone looking over their shoulder, it’s difficult to convince them to get back into the office, especially if it’s to meet anyone else’s schedule or more than a few days a week. (I recently witnessed something of a minor insurrection in one workplace that tried to create stricter rules about working from home. It was movie-worthy material).
The bosses’ worry, I think, is not just about filling the office chairs or preventing slacking. It’s also two other things: firstly, many employees actually do appear to function better, both as workers and people, with regular face-to-face interactions and with the benefit of learning from others up close. (I don’t like this social science, and I’m tagged in it). And secondly, many employers are concerned that if this level of autonomy is won by workers, more demands might follow. As you might imagine, I find the first concern ultimately aligned with my politics in at least some ways, and the second not so much. But they both make sense from employers’ perspectives.
I might return to this topic again on this blog. For now, it’s perhaps simply worth saying that I think there are some possible mutually-acceptable ways to (partially) address this problem, e.g. ways to grant employees greater autonomy that are relatively winnable from employers. For increasing workplace autonomy in general, I’m a big fan of letting people design their own way of reporting back and letting them choose their own way of both solving problems and evaluating solutions. Not only does this raise people’s sense of autonomy (and maybe even their actual meaningful autonomy, in a small way) but it also makes people more likely to work with commitment rather than doing whatever they were told in a halfhearted way.14 Creating reliable usable systems for learning and advancement helps too, as many people leave because they feel there’s nowhere to “go”, advancement-wise, from where they are.
For getting people into the office, I think it’s worth thinking about making workplaces actually nice social spaces, making work a place where you learn specific useful concrete skills and get to showcase them to others, making work a good place to enter a “flow state” (so NOT most open-office plans!) and supporting people so they acquire at least one crucially important and very real work friend (more on this important work friend some other time!)
All those things would make me more likely to go to an office or sign a long-term contract. Interestingly, though, I don’t know if they’d be enough to make me take a full-time job. I simply feel in my bones that I want to set the direction for each day of my life, and especially each year. I want more than what is listed in the paragraph above as my version of autonomy at work. I want choices that go beyond my hours and where it happens and how much I take on, which are the kinds of things easily programmed into a console. I want to choose the kinds of things I make and the effects they have on the world, I want to get to opt not to work for periods of time, I want creativity and learning built in, I want to choose my colleagues, even, I want ownership and care.
This is not just my personal bugbear, but rather, as all the wonky social science and psychology literature suggests, the desire of many others, however incipient and unformed. There could be a political vision built to appeal to this set of desires. I think it would be a winner…and cognitive science agrees.
Meanwhile, I ask myself: am I more free for choosing to be an “independent” worker? Perhaps only in a cosmetic way, at least for now. The autonomy I have as a freelancer is at some level hollow, because my fundamental economic insecurity is still entirely real. And yet, like so many of us, I’m going to chase it anyway.
I say this with the immediate caveat I was a very privileged, overeducated, hyper-networked freelancer and I do think that the most privileged freelancers tend to clean up and leave the market rather bare for anyone else less marketable. This is, interestingly, a very common type of independent worker, statistically - and a growing type too.
There appears to be less data on whether people in the UK are self-employed by choice, and there also has been more of a dip in self-employment during the pandemic: https://www.statista.com/statistics/318234/united-kingdom-self-employed/#:~:text=As%20of%20July%202023%2C%20there,at%20the%20start%20of%202020.
See articles like this one: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1120-1, social science research like this: https://whatworkswellbeing.org/blog/using-understanding-society-data-to-explore-wellbeing-in-london/, or visit the wealth of literature that supports the literature around “Self-Determination Theory.”
See e.g. https://hbr.org/2021/10/forget-flexibility-your-employees-want-autonomy and https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news-archive/2017/autonomy-in-the-workplace-has-positive-effects-on-well-being-and-job-satisfaction-study-finds especially, and many other places besides.
I would also like to express surprise that American seem more into freelance work than British people at the moment, given that I treasure my free healthcare and would be afraid to be without it as a freelancer. But this, too, might be a case of a cultural pressure towards “freedom” winning out over material forces…?
Interestingly, they also found that lower-status employees do more harmful things to their bodies more frequently, like smoking, perhaps because they are permanently stressed out rather than intermittently so. But even if you control for things like this, the more powerful employees still live longer.
Independent workers are disproportionately carers, according to the latest MBO report, and women, especially millennial women, independent workers are extremely likely to list this as a reason for working independently.
A shameless diversion: this is, I sometimes think, part of why people tend to want to so tightly control their home lives and often isolate themselves as a result. As someone who has chosen communal living even though I’m now pulling 30 and can afford otherwise, I find people often want to ask me if it limits my autonomy. They’re not necessarily wrong to worry about this, but I sometimes wonder if a lot of this concern is actually about the fact that we do live in very high control institutions right up until the time we go out “to work”, and then usually “at work” also. Our lives are, in other words, pretty controlling even when we think we’re being free, autonomous individuals. So maybe we look for what we see as “control” in the few places we can get it, like not having to share the remote.
(Pandemics! War! Untrustworthy and fascistic governments! Possibly aliens living among us? Add to this list as you see fit, there’s so many options!). If you want to read more social science surveys about people’s lack of trust in institutions, the Edelman Global Trust Barometer is an interesting read: https://www.edelman.com/trust/2024/trust-barometer. Each year it essentially tries to tell those working in business that, although their innovations are of course good for society, capitalist growth leaves a wake of social distrust behind it… Trust in governments are also at near historic lows: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/public-trust-in-government-1958-2023/
One can see this kind of thing in lots of areas of human life. Consider how people turn to subcultures when they aren’t anyway able to fit into the main one.
The 2019 MBO report notes many use independent work as a way to earn more given that companies have gotten better and better in the last 20 years at not sharing their profits with workers. 53% in this report saw independent work as more stable, and 53% also said they would not go back to traditional work. https://s29814.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/MBO-SOI-2019.pdf
Finally, the rise of AI and automation probably leave further reasons for people to be wary of investing in their careers in a traditional way. See https://the-decoder.com/3-in-5-workers-fear-being-replaced-by-ai-and-that-was-before-chatgpt/ One day Uber, too, hopes to replace its drivers entirely with self-driving cars.
There are all kinds of studies on how and why employees with autonomy often perform better. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12510608/ for the negative effects of micromanagement, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12683308/ for low autonomy and its effect on turnover, https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/28/2/166/661129 for more positive effects of workplace autonomy , https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.01496.x for the effects of being able to make decisions at work on burnout, and so on.
There are many in my experience who are simply seceding from organizations without knowing what they'll do over time.