ABSTRACT
Anthropology has extensively explored labor’s relationship to capital, to compensation, to gender, and to political struggle. Law, however, is at once omnipresent and absent in this story. Ethnographies are replete with references to the statutes and government programs responsible for defining and regulating work, yet are often missing serious consideration of the dialectical relationship between legal concepts and labor realities. This chapter considers one such relationship, between the legal test most commonly used to classify workers as “employees” in the United States (as well as in many other Common Law jurisdictions) and the way workers, among others, conceptualize the ostensible focus of that test—namely, freedom at work. The chapter situates itself in the context of “gig work,” the smartphone-mediated, algorithmically managed labor practices that have invited scholarly analysis by lawyers and anthropologists alike. As my fieldwork suggests, gig workers understand and desire freedom at work in ways that are and are not captured by the Common Law Control test. This mismatch generates conceptual circularities in the law governing work, and it also produces labor realities that are increasingly acknowledged as exploitative. Neither of these dynamics is fully visible without an anthropology of labor that is attentive to legal concepts.
