Capitalism is trying to move to a model where everyone is atomically isolated, an independent contractor making anonymous sales in a marketplace. That means lawyers, contracts, and rigid rules and documentation. The more pure a market is, the more lawyers and rules you need to make it work. The goal is to eliminate the kind of fluid high trust social networks that characterized work life in the past. Partly because if everything is more rigid, it's easier to exert control, partly to prevent things like unions from forming. They want a perfectly abstracted workforce, free from the messy details that force you to treat your workforce as made up of people. Notice that we went from "personnel" to "human resources" to "human capital management". That's the Ayn Rand utopian dream made real. The idea is to turn people into units of production to be bought and sold, and you can't have a market for a commodity unless they are all the same. So, you must be made identical, so that the price of labor means something. Every criticism leveled against systems of control in the book "Seeing Like a State" apply to capitalism too. When people talk about a free market, remember that they're talking about a free market for
labor more than anything else. You are the
product in this scenario, not the customer.
But even here, the purity of the labor market is hampered by rules designed to protect the laborer- osha rules, overtime rules, rules about how much a person can be controlled, and so forth. If you eliminate all those, and focus only on the making labor freely able to be bought and sold, you can begin to see what a completely pure free market for abstracted, commodity labor would look like.
It is this: The most pure example of a free market for labor is a slave auction.