Outsourcing, with or without offshoring, through extended supply chains of goods and services has come to be a common way to organize a business. Using contract law to divide and subdivide what was once a single enterprise (or start one from scratch) into separate legal entities is ever more useful to businesses as they try to cut their costs to become ever more competitive. If vertical integration was once the norm – e.g., Ford’s River Rouge plant where iron ore, coal, sand, rubber came in one end and Ford cars came out the other – the norm is now to have flat and horizontal relation-based groups of legally independent entities that can stretch around the world. The business entities farthest from the core of the enterprise frequently are almost ephemeral in to their organization, ownership and even life span. These frequently operate at the fringe of the formal economy and often in the informal economy where they escape coverage by the domestic labor and employment laws of the place where the work is performed. “Middlemen” operated as a bridge between the c