1. Historically, wage-earning employment has involved the subordination of the wage-earner to the employer.
But history is one thing; the logic of economic exchange is another. The subordination link is an extra-economic criterion because, in all economic exchanges — including the one between an employer and an employee — the contract is synallagmatic: it binds each party to the other, so that each owes the other reciprocal obligations and, consequently, in law and in fact, is under a reciprocal subordination.
2. The statement "a wage-earner is required to obey orders from his employer" is not an economic statement.
Economically, the employer is the wage-earner's client, and their relation is an economic exchange defined by reciprocal obligations. The orders in question are therefore of two kinds. Either they are of the same kind as those a customer places with a supplier — in which case they belong to the economic exchange and are reciprocal, not a subordination — or they carry injunctions of a different kind, which fall outside the economic exchange and are, precisely, extra-economic.
3. The purpose of the employment contract is to provide a service in exchange for a wage.
This remains true when the employer is a public administration. A civil servant is, in his capacity as a wage-earner, a merchant who sells the product of his work to his employer. Any other wage-earner for profit is in the same position.
4. Making the relationship of subordination the criterion of the status of wage-earner has unfortunate consequences.
The labor market is divided into categories that fall under different regimes. This results in distortions of competition, unjustified inequalities and a proliferation of administrative complications. We must ask ourselves whether a completely decompartmentalized labor market is one of the characteristics of a deideologized economy.
5. The labor market is better organized if all labor remuneration is easily comparable.
Currently, and especially in France, this is not even the case for all jobs governed by law by a relationship of subordination. This is even less so when the comparison is extended to other forms of remuneration for work, such as that of the liberal professions and self-employed people, for example.