Controversy over the adjusters' middleman role has risen right along with their numbers.

The systems also serve business owners by shifting the decision-making to employees and taking the employers out of the middleman role.

Japanese farmers would go on to play a similar middleman role in the Venice Celery Strike in 1936 and in the rise of the Nisei Farmers League in the 1970s.

News reports also indicated that Ghorbanifar sought to be paid for the middleman role.

Enron then began engaging in scores of losing broadband trades with Reliant in order to pay that company for its middleman role, according to executives and traders at the two companies.

"Moscow just cannot bear to give up that middleman role, where they decide, this we allow, this we forbid," he said.

Net Passport becomes popular, Microsoft will play a prominent middleman role in e-commerce transactions.

First, playing the middleman role on the Internet is going to be a tricky way to make a living.

"We're going to be very selective about stepping into the middleman role," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of I.B.M.'s Internet division.

The Scythian nomadic aristocracy not only served a middleman role, but also actively participated in the trade of grain produced by dependent farmers as well as slaves, skins and other goods.