Ooooh, now that's an idea -- unfortunately, as a Bitcoin miner, I'm self-employed. Oh, well ....
Are you? Are you mining solo? :-)
OK, let's modify the above example, when you don't feel yourself "employed" by Slush. ;-) If you're self-employed, you get money for some goods or services.
Then, when you don't deliver your goods or services, you're not paid. OK now? ;-)
Yup, I get "official" money (or other things of value) from the BTC I produce by mining.
In a pool we're all self-employed, including the pool operator. For example, Slush is self-employed -- he sells network and accounting services to pool members. We can either pay fees to Slush (or some other pool operator) for access to his node on the Bitcoin network and his accounting services to tally our shares of the blocks we collectively mine via his node, or we can save those fees by going solo, setting up our own nodes and doing our own accounting -- then we can generate even more income by selling access to our nodes to others, and helping them with their accounting (for a fee, of course!).
My current thinking is that 2% for Slush's services is reasonable and well worth the time and energy it would take to operate solo. Might think differently if I had a few Terahash to dig with.