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Notes -
Servants were often in a similar position. Back in the day, even quite poor famillies would often have a cook, say, who had a personal role in that household. Now, people still employ cooks, but they work in warehouses preparing meals for Uber Eats.
The bad of personal employment: less personal agency, more potential for victimisation at the hands of bad employers. The good: your employers are pretty explicitly responsible for your general wellbeing in the eyes of society, and they aren't so beholden to profit margins.
Or to put it another way, in a fluid modern economy, nobody is responsible for you except for you. That can be very empowering, but it can also put you in a position where all of your options are bad and you end up essentially responsible for exploiting yourself.
Which is, sadly, the desired end goal of Liberalism and the quest to return to the state of nature. Now the problem is that this isn't actually conducive to the promises made alongside it, such as equality, but even if it were, the prospect of destroying all that is human about the relationships we have in exchange for some individualistic principles is something that normal people have never desired.
There's a lot of literature on how schooling was made mandatory specifically to break the spirit of the peasant hordes so they would behave like good cogs for the industrial machine. Much of Luddism is about resiting just this tendency, and I don't think the Luddites were ever heard for the substance of their criticism.
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