Indice
The legal analysis and comparison between it and the fundamentals of economics clearly shows how the ‘new globalisation’ is based on a ‘fictional economy’, which allows the world’s largest market player to move around within a supranational sphere with a multitude of apparently separate legal entities, and that the main driver of this ‘apparent economy’ is precisely intra-firm outsourcing, i.e. the apparent outsourcing of something that continues to be managed internally.
The only variable that is effectively outsourced is the legal accountability for certain business choices or factors, which takes the form of a wealth accumulation process in which profit – understood as the difference between revenues and costs – is only one component.
The subsidiary, that is managed by a third party, cannot be considered a firm as its business organisation and its functioning for the creation of value is the expression of a managerial-entrepreneurial power that lies beyond these legal entities. Within the corporate group, the subsidiaries therefore take on the task of performing certain functions like any other corporate division or department.
Legal independence is therefore only effective vis-à-vis third parties – workers, public institutions, suppliers, etc. – who can only claim against the subsidiary with which they have a contractual relationship, and not against the entire group company to which it belongs.
The terminological contradiction between the principle of independence and the principle of control within the same company is most clearly expressed in the outsourcing markets, where it becomes clear that the coexistence of management by third parties and independence is impossible, unless one wants to accept, politically but certainly not scientifically, the existence of a market that has been fundamentally distorted, in which it is possible to do business without a firm.
The ‘borderline case’ is where a parent company enters into a supply agreement with a wholly-owned subsidiary, which exclusively carries out its activities under this agreement (so-called ‘single-contract’ companies). The contract gives rise to a commercial transaction that therefore does not take place between two firms, but between two companies belonging to the same firm. There is, therefore, no conflict of interests, the governing power is exercised by the parent company, which in a group context assumes the entrepreneurial function. As a result, seller and buyer would coincide, and the exchange price would be nothing more than an instrument of contractual pressure not with the formal counterparty, but with the actual counterparties of the subsidiaries, first and foremost the workers.