| Summary: | The article seeks to improve understanding of the legal issues raised by the subordination of employees whose remuneration comes from third-party employers. Based on a case study of French hotel concierges, whose work questions the boundaries between wage-earning and free-lancing, it looks at the broad determinants of wage-earning employees’ identity and the social conditions that create this ambiguous status. Partly determined by the socio-historical conditions of their recruitment, concierges’ dispositional affinities with independence can assume various forms: material independence; emancipation from social constraints; and independence from hotel guests, service providers or management. Accounting for the variability of these affinities makes for a better assessment of the impact that the State’s legal intervention has on the definition of these atypical employees’ status, while exploring the room to manoeuvre that they possess, collectively and individually, in resisting said intervention.
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