It's a different relationship, but it is still not the same as being employed. The people here equating the two are either clueless or disingenuous, I'd hope for the former but I fear the latter.
It's easy to piss on those that manage their one person business over multiple years from the comfort of an actual employed situation, and it is equally easy to piss on them from the position of the manager or early hire of a business with a lot of employees and a lot of customers.
But the amount of responsibility that typically lands on the shoulders of these one man operations tends to be disproportional and they deal with those responsibilities in a much better way than many of those large companies. The main reason that they stay in business in the first place is because they tend to be good at what they do, and reputation damage being what it is in that world the first job you fuck up may well be your last.
It's easy to piss on those that manage their one person business over multiple years from the comfort of an actual employed situation, and it is equally easy to piss on them from the position of the manager or early hire of a business with a lot of employees and a lot of customers.
But the amount of responsibility that typically lands on the shoulders of these one man operations tends to be disproportional and they deal with those responsibilities in a much better way than many of those large companies. The main reason that they stay in business in the first place is because they tend to be good at what they do, and reputation damage being what it is in that world the first job you fuck up may well be your last.