I think they find it disgusting because all the risk is shifted onto the employee. By the time 3-8 weeks have elapsed, the employee has definitely quit or lost their previous job, so if they don't get hired, they will be involuntarily unemployed, with no prospects because they've been busy with their "audition".
I think the problem is that full-time employment and everything around it is like keeping animals in a zoo. You hope and beg for vacation time. You pretend to work 8 (actually 10 to "look good") hours even if you finish all your work in 1. The most personal work you can hope to retain after you leave, beyond a blurb on your resume is to sneak around behind your employer's back and work on your own stuff. There is tons of politics.
The salary negotiation is itself about trading getting the employer to basically take care of you (especially in Japanese corporations, as patio11 often mentions) so you can reduce your risk. The infantile mentality inculcated in people receiving conditional welfare is present in FTE -- pg's essay about schools and jails would be applicable here. One can even argue that our education system has been designed to prepare the majority for being obedient and loyal FTE workers.
I'd rather society replaced all this with an UNCONDITIONAL basic income for everyone and everyone would be free from any age to work as a self employed contractor. That would effectively abolish the minimum wage and let people learn through doing projects where they are treated with respect, not as animals in a zoo.
I think libertarians talking about philosophical freedoms should take a serious look at actual personal freedom as defined by the range of options each person has.
> You pretend to work 8 (actually 10 to "look good") hours even if you finish all your work in 1.
Maybe my experience isn't representative, but at my job there is actually work to do: you know, hard problems that take time to think through and solve.
> The infantile mentality inculcated in people receiving conditional welfare is present in FTE
Substitute "conditional welfare" with "earned compensation".
How is it infantile to voluntarily negotiate compensation with someone for whom you will be providing value (ie. your employer) and yet not infantile to demand unconditional welfare from society as a whole?
Unconditional basic income is unconditional, so it doesn't have the downside of conditional welfare: people are afraid to earn too much money because they'll lose their welfare income, and then they're in danger of losing that new revenue and they can't get back on welfare right away so they're up the creek without a paddle. So they cling to the safety of welfare. And this + minimum wage laws keep them from developing themselves and creating monetizable value that builds on itself year after year.
And this is similar to the threat of losing your steady paycheck if you don't behave, as is evidenced in part by the great grandparent comment. There is a lot of dysfunctional politics and dynamics that comes from being in that sort of situation and environment, which pg's essay "why nerds are unpopular" describes at length. Incidentally, pg is also very anti FTE personally, likening it to eating roadkill.
Look at it like this -- can you work on your own awesome project that will change the world? Not if your employer wouldnt be pleased. Maybe you'll sneak around like a kid does. If you work for a bank, can you take a position as a CFO at a startup? I have heard people say they can't do this, or that, because their employer wouldnt like it. I've seen tons of people sitting around and pretending to work, because their employer was covering the risk, but they are afraid of losing their job. It's a conditional paycheck that by definition demands your full time for whatever odd job comes up once you're there. And they even try to make you work longer hours without valuing them as they would with a contractor.
I don't mean to say that there are absolutely no fulfilling, productive fulltime jobs. Just that the vast majority of people experience many of the downsides of FTE including the infantile mentality. Plus many of those people believe their own jobs are not productive and can be eliminated:
