Individual Autonomy, Freedom of Contract and the Labour Market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Individual liberty, contractual freedom and market participation are justiciable fundamental rights under the Indian Constitution. Individual rights to freedom of trade, business, profession and occupation are the bases of contractual freedom under the Constitution. However, freedom of contract is not identical to freedom of trade or profession. The scope of the latter is much broader than the former. An individual's profession, occupation, trade or business is also an expression of individual choices and aspirations – things that individuals value in their lives – when such choices are not substantially constrained. Contractual freedom is of a narrower import compared to the freedom of trade or profession, but an important one that also facilitates the aforementioned individual aspirations under market conditions. An exclusive focus on contractual freedom as an indicator to evaluate the scope (and realisation) of freedom of trade sidelines other motivations of workers to engage in a specific profession, occupation or business. An exclusive focus on the freedom of market exchange (that is, contract) also comes at the cost of ignoring the prerequisites and corequisites of such exchange. Such focus does not capture the role of education, training, skills, resources, social circumstances, cultural sensitivities and other factors that help expand the real freedom of the parties to such an exchange. To elaborate, there is a valid basis to argue, as John Gardner does, that an isolated focus on the freedom of contract is restrictive of overall individual freedom. In the context of the employment relationship, if the primary legal emphasis lies on preserving or promoting the contractual feature of the relationship, the employee identity narrows down to that of an instrument of exchange (of labour), or contractor. As instruments of exchange employees remain merely as means of performing the (employer’s) contract. This instrumental understanding of employees articulates a narrow view of an employee's freedom, including her right to freedom of trade, by denying the capacity of choice and aspiration of such employee. Work or employment is broader than mere contractual exchange since it also signifies a worker's aspiration and self-fulfilment. This (or any ) human aspiration is bound to be broader than an instrumental – means to something – understanding of one's freedom of contract. Accordingly, a mere contractual understanding of employment, without also referring to other social commitments (including other individual freedoms), is restrictive of the very freedom (that is, freedom of trade) that it purports to promote.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".