A note on self-employment in the USA

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A good story about the self-employed in the USA was just published:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=568&ncid=568&e=6&u=/nm/20040
131/bs_nm/bizeconomy_employment_dc

Self-employed persons are not very clearly identified in US statistics
beyond a few totals. Part of the reason seems to be the way "employed
persons" are defined e.g. in the CPS, namely as persons 16 years and over in
the civilian noninstitutional population "who, during the reference week,
(a) did any work at all (at least 1 hour) as paid employees, worked in their
own business, profession, or on their own farm, or worked 15 hours or more
as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of the family, and
(b) all those who were not working but who had jobs or businesses from which
they were temporarily absent, whether or not they were paid for the time off
or were seeking other jobs". Excluded here are persons whose only activity
consisted of work around their own house, or volunteer work. (The civilian
noninstitutional population includes persons 16 years of age and older
residing in the 50 States and DC who are not inmates of institutions (for
example, corrective institutions and mental hospitals, homes for the aged),
who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces (or hotel transients, persons
living on board vessels etc.).

In other words, if you are "employed" in the USA, this doesn't imply at all,
that there is an employer actually employing you, i.e. that you are an
employee, just that you are "occupied and working for pay" at some minimum
level. Thus, an employee is "employed", an employer is "employed",  the
self-employed are also "employed", but unpaid family workers on farms are
also "employed". The number of people who are actually employers of workers
isn't tabulated clearly, and there is no standard classification of
employment status. The concept of "unemployed" is not without problems
either.

Thus, the statistical system in effect pretends that the employer-employee
relation, the very foundation of bourgeois society, doesn't really exist as
a social relation, and one has to do some digging in the data sources to
find out more about it. The Bureau of the Census does conduct a survey of
self-employed businesses, but here the emphasis is on business units by
industry, rather than on the self-employed persons themselves, and
partnerships are not clearly distinguished (voluntary work is also surveyed
by the Bureau of the Census).

Undoubtedly there are measurement problems, since income from
self-employment is typically understated, and difficult to track, and
one-person self-employed enterprises are much easier to start and stop, or
to engage in as an additional occupation alongside paid work for a boss,
creating problems for the statistical survey frame that is the basis of
estimation. The Internal Revenue Department also separately identifies
proprietors and partnerships filing tax returns, but those aggregates
probably also understate the reality.

Creative human work, the mainspring of economic wealth in capitalist
society, becomes treated in statistical and business reports as "abstract
labour", as "just a quantity of labour", a "labour cost" in the reified
categories of market commerce, the most abstract expression of which is the
statistical "labour cost index" in which one number denotes an abstract
"cost" which doesn't even refer back to wages or incomes, never mind the
work for which they are paid.

Thus, human work disappears in the ideological depiction of "the economy",
whatever that is.  Even so, it is even actually hard to establish definitely
from the statistical system how many people are actually working in the USA,
and how many are not - even if we're just talking only about federal
employees - and this is not just due to measurement problems, but to the
concepts and categories used to collect data.

Paradoxically, the very same academics who strenuously deny Marx's theory of
economic value in capitalist society will nevertheless quite happily bandy
about all sort of abstractions like the ones I have mentioned, completely
unaware that in so doing, they are already implying a valuation scheme, that
they are already operating with a concept of value anyhow.

And that is really the innermost secret of capitalism: the use of a concept
of value in practice, which is not acknowledged explicitly, it is an
unmentionable, rather it is presented as something else - and in that case,
it is little wonder than economics and the economy become incomprehensible.

When, however, we investigate accounting systems, it is very clear that in
defining and allocating "costs" and "revenues" consistently as such (i.e.
all transactions are accounted for either as costs or as revenues), we must
already implicitly have a concept of conserved value and new value added, a
concept of value-augmentation, which is arrived at through an examination of
the exchange relations involved, exchange relations in which "what is owned
by you is transferred to ownership by me" or vice versa - exactly the
starting point of Marx's discussion in Das Kapital.

That means, that in the very definition of economic value, reference to
"ownership relations" must be made, because exchange presupposes them. This
very simple insight is the basis for Marx's judgement, that discussions of
value as being just a "subjective utility preference" is vulgar economics,
vulgar in the precise sense, that it is shallow, unreflected thinking
unaware of the source of its own concepts in the external world. Hence his
emphasis on epistemic materialism: we must distinguish between the ideas of
the minds of men, and the origins of their ideas in their practical
activity, their social relations and tangible life-world.

The word "to employ" seems to have originated in the 15th century France
(employer, empleier), apparently derived from the Latin implicare meaning
"enfold, involve, be connected with" with the connotation of "to hire" or
"to engage" or "take on". The word surfaced in England in the 16th century,
suggesting a meaning of "being involved in a particular purpose, venture or
endeavour" The term "employee" as used in the USA from the mid-19th century
is derived from the French employé (masculine) or employeé (feminine).

"All economy reduces to the economy of work-time" - Karl Marx, Foundations
for the Critique of Political Economy.

J.