Beyond Ethnic Relations: Racial Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State in Republican France

To explain racial fissures in France today, one must revisit the structural and ideological failings in the origin of key Republican institutions. This article analyzes how the symbolic and material significance of labor structures imposed on black French citizens in the Third Republic produced differentiation in the value of labor to the nation. The production of social patterns and belief systems based on racial inequality were integrated into the structure of the French welfare state. The experience of black political actors, Hégésippe Légitimus, Blaise Diange, Lamine Senghor, and the state illustrates how the welfare state, as an engine of assimilation, defined a differential and racialized status for blacks during the process of crucial institution building. Although the majority of blacks in the French Empire were subjects during the Third Republic, the experience of those who were citizens indicates contradictions related to incorporation and race.     

从法国穆斯林移民的生存现状透视法国的移民模式

法国季节性人口迁移由来已久,且迁移的地域遍及欧洲。欧洲国家对人口迁徙情况进行清查和评估始于1805年法兰西第一帝国时期,当时实行以"血统主义"为原则的国籍制度,其用意在于保证拿破仑军队充足的兵源,这与后来共和政体实行的"属地主义"原则相对立。21世纪初,移民问题成为法国对内政策面临的一大挑战,它与公共安全、国民身份认同、就业市场、欧盟公共事务政策的制订以及在第二代移民中实现法国模式的"共和"与"非宗教化"的融合等重大问题息息相关。欧洲国家之间与欧洲国家之外的人口迁移引发以下问题:欧洲居民的原国籍问题、法国国籍问题、法国公民权的行使问题以及在重组后的家庭种族构成愈加复杂的条件下个人身份的构建问题等。     

Les prud’hommes et la fabrique du droit du travail : contribution à une sociologie des rôles judiciaires

How do the persons on French labor relation tribunals (prud’hommes), where representatives from employer associations and labor unions sit, help, through the awards they make, shape law in the field of labor relations? A “sociographic” survey brings to light both the plurality of forms of commitment to this institution and the key role played by a group of “professionals” in these tribunals. The analysis of how these persons have been socialized in this institution and of how they formulate judgements shows that the awards made stem from three different but combined rationales: the law, labor union representation and the world of work. Another way of studying the work of a judiciary is proposed in between the social arrangements of magistrates, institutional affiliations and practices related to judgements.     

French Labor Tribunals and the making of Labor law. Toward a sociology of judiciary roles

How do the verdicts of French joint industrial tribunals (Conseils de prud’hommes) participate in shaping the law in the field of labor relations? A “sociographic” survey brings to light both the multiplicity of forms of commitment to the institution and the key role played by a group of “professionals” in these labor tribunals, where elected representatives of employer associations and trade-unions sit side by side. Analyzing how councillors are socialized by the institution and how they arrive at their decisions shows that judgments stem from a combination of three different rationales: the law, union representation and the world of work. Between magistrates’ social characteristics, institutional affiliations and manners of judging, a new way of studying judiciary activity is suggested.     

Sexual Orientation,Unemployment and Participation: Are Gays Less Employable than Straights?

This paper is the first attempt to assess, in a unified econometric framework, the existence and the magnitude of both the sexual orientation participation gap and the sexual orientation unemployment gap. Having identified male same-sex couples using the Employment Survey, we use a bivariate probit selection model where the labor supply and the employment equation are jointly estimated for the French labor market. The results show that both participation and employment probabilities are significantly lower for gay employees compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Further investigations indicate that young gay workers, particularly, are more exposed to the unemployment risk than older ones. The beginning of a professional career and the subsequent entry to the labor market appear to be difficult steps to overcome for gay workers who spend more time than their heterosexual counterparts to find the good job.     

Cohort size and migration in a West Indian population

The author examines the relationship between cohort size and migration patterns among the population of the French West Indies island of St. Barthelemy. Data show that "for people born from 1878 to 1967, neither cohort size nor fluctuations in external demands for labor had a lasting effect on the probability of eventual migration. Emigration rates only slowed after the development of the local tourist industry brought prosperity to the island."     

Tax–benefit revealed social preferences

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that would make the observed marginal tax rate schedule optimal. In this framework, the issue of the optimality of an existing tax–benefit system is transformed into the issue of the shape of the social welfare function associated with that system and whether it satisfies elementary properties. This method is applied to the French redistribution system with the interesting implication that the French redistribution authority may appear, under some plausible scenario concerning the size of the labor supply behavioral reactions, non Paretian (e.g. giving negative marginal social weights to the richest class of tax payers).     

Sexual Orientation and Wage Discrimination in France: The Hidden Side of the Rainbow

This article is the first study to present an econometric evaluation of wage discrimination based on sexual orientation in the French labor market. Having identified same-sex couples using the French Employment Survey, we estimate the wage gap related to sexual orientation in the private and public sectors, in order to analyze whether or not lesbians and gays suffer a wage penalty. The results obtained show the existence of a wage penalty for homosexual male workers, as compared with their heterosexual counterparts, in both the private and public sectors; the magnitude of this discrimination varies from about ?6.5?% in the private sector, to ?5.5?% in the public sector. In the private sector, the wage penalty suffered by gay employees is higher for skilled workers than for the unskilled, and??in both sectors??the wage penalty is higher for older workers than for younger ones. As with many other countries, we do not find any evidence of the existence of a wage discrimination against lesbians.     

Invisible labor,invisible bodies: how the global political economy affects reproductive freedom in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholars have critically demonstrated the links between the global political economy, social reproduction and gender-based violence. This article builds on this scholarship by investigating restrictions to reproductive freedom and their connection to the depletion of women’s bodies in the global political economy. Specifically, I use the Depletion through Social Reproduction (DSR) framework to reveal how the work of social reproduction is harnessed to service economic activity at the cost of rights to bodily integrity with the aid of religious fundamentalist ideologies that (re)inscribe discourses of female altruism such as the “self-sacrificing mother” ideal. Drawing on the case of the Philippines, I argue that the control of women’s bodies is integral to the Philippines’ economic strategy of exporting care workers in a competitive global political economy. This strategy is abetted by local Catholic religious fundamentalists who challenge reproductive rights reform at various levels of policy-making and legitimize the lack of investment to sustain social reproduction in the household, community and country as a whole. This article suggests that the neoliberal global economy is increasingly reproduced through women’s labor at the cost of their bodily integrity and reproductive freedoms.     

‘Never be free without trustin’ some person’: networking and buying freedom in the nineteenth-century United States

The strengthening economy of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States further solidified the commodification of the enslaved and their labor. In response to these forces some African-Americans looked to use slavery’s market to buy their freedom. Self-purchase was a crucial path to freedom for African-Americans throughout the nineteenth century. This article examines how African-Americans created economic opportunities, formed networks, and accumulated both social and economic capital as they worked to buy freedom.     

The role of foreign workers in the seasonal fluctuations of the French economy

The few studies that have been carried out only take into account the annual inflows of seasonal immigrants. This present article covers 2 other aspects of the problem: 1) the seasonal nature of immigration in general and 2) above all the role of permanent immigrant workers in certain sectors influenced by seasonal changes. The number of permanent first-time immigrants is determined, among other causes, by the need for a certain seasonal regulation of overall economic activity. The role of the foreign work force is o fparticular importance in 3 sectors influenced by seasonal changes, and it fulfills a function of seasonal regulation of activity in at least 2 of these sectors: the building trade and agriculture. However, the recognition of the need for seasonal regulation has been used as a pretext for making employment more unstable, in particular for permanent immigrant workers, many of whom cannot find work for the whole year. Seasonal work also plays a key role in agriculture and the hotel trade. Moreover, the part played by illegal immigrants is decisive, not only in these 2 sectors, but throughout the illegal labor market. In the years to come it is likely that seasonal immigration will continue to fall perhaps by half, as a result of mechanization in general, its application in grape-harvesting, and the adoption of new farming techniques. However, it will probably remain sufficiently high to make up for the lack of a national reserve of seasonal labor, especially in vegetable and fruit farming, lumbering, and catering. Seasonal immigration will doubtlessly continue also because it puts a downward pessure on the average wage and makes employment more precarious. It also constitutes a reserve of illegal labor, which can be used in sectors which have a crucial impact on the balance of goods and services in France. These advantages for the French government and employers are above all disadvantages for the seasonal immigrant workers themselves, whose living and health conditions are increasingly catastrophic.     

Choice,freedom, and freedom of choice

This paper argues in favour of a distinction between freedom and freedom of choice – a distinction that economists and political philosophers have so far either ignored or drawn wrongly. Drawing the distinction correctly may help to resolve a number of disputes in contemporary political philosophy and non-welfarist normative economics regarding the so-called preference-based account of freedom and the relevance, to judgements about freedom, of degrees of similarity between agents options. The paper begins by setting out three much discussed axioms for the measurement of freedom (of choice?) originally put forward by Pattanaik and Xu. It is suggested that the problems these axioms give rise to can be solved by distinguishing correctly between freedom and freedom of choice. The paper then sets out definitions of freedom, choice and freedom of choice, justifying these in philosophical terms and arguing their superiority to alternative definitions. Finally, on the basis of these definitions and with reference to Pattanaik and Xus axioms, it is shown that an agent can enjoy freedom without enjoying freedom of choice, and that she can enjoy an increase in one of these without enjoying an increase in the other. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I should like to thank Keith Dowding, Martin van Hees, Matthew Kramer, Marco Negri, Serena Olsaretti, Olof Page, Mario Ricciardi, Alan Ritter, Hillel Steiner, Kotaro Suzumura and audiences at seminars in Manchester, Palermo, Pavia and Oxford. I am grateful to the Italian Ministry for Higher Education (MURST) and the Italian National Research Council (CNR) for funding that facilitated the completion of the paper.     

Division of Domestic Work: Is There Adjustment Between Partners when One is Unemployed?

Coming back to the main models of division of work within the couple, the aim of this article is to analyze the possible transfers of domestic chores between partners facing an external shock. We test it by studying the allocation of domestic time on couples facing unemployment on the French time-use survey. Are domestic chores transferable between partners? Controlled for many covariates, bivariate tobit regressions on indicators of time, variety and number of activities show that domestic tasks performed by unemployed people, either men or women, increase. Despite the inertia due to couple’s specialization, the hypothesis of versatility is partially checked. “Dominantly Feminine tasks” are the more transferable tasks. Unemployment involves a new division of labor between spouses.     

Measuring autonomy freedom

In the measurement of autonomy freedom, the admissible potential preference relations are elicited by means of the concept of ‘reasonableness’. In this paper we argue for an alternative criterion based on information about the decision maker’s ‘awareness’ of his available opportunities. We argue that such an interpretation of autonomy fares better than that based on reasonableness. We then introduce some axioms that capture this intuition and study their logical implications. In the process, a new measure of autonomy freedom is characterized, which generalizes some of the measures so far constructed in the literature.We thank Martin van Hees, Robert Sugden, Prasanta Pattanaik, the participants at workshops at the CPNSS, London School of Economics, and at the University of Caen and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. The support of the CPNSS is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is part of a research project on “The Analysis and Measurement of Freedom” funded by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (Italy). Its financial support is gratefully acknowledged.     

Measures of freedom

According to the capability approach and more orthodox theories of individual well-being, freedom is an important ingredient of individual welfare. In operationalising these theories, therefore, it is crucial to have a practical measure of freedom. This paper analyses the measures of freedom proposed by Pattanaik and Xu, Steiner and Carter, Kramer, and Rosenbaum. We provide two interpretations of the first three measures. It is shown that one of these interpretations can be useful in empirical applications, while the other, together with additional arguments, considerably weakens Kramer's measure of freedom. Finally, it is shown that Rosenbaum's measure is not satisfactory as well because it yields counterintuitive results.     

Machinisme, marxisme, humanisme : Georges Friedmann avant et après-guerre

Georges Friedmann (1902-1977) is known as the founder, following WW II, of a “sociology of humanist work”. Before the war, he was a Marxist intellectual, close to the Communist Party, who admired the young Soviet Union. How this political and ideological itinerary affected his sociology of labor, has never been systematically analyzed. To do so, “machinism” (mechanization), a key concept in the first part of Friedmann’s writing, is scrutinized. This concept came not from Marx, but from Michelet’s romantic conception of history, with which Friedmann was familiar. Following the war, it was given up for the pair “natural/technical milieu”; but this shift in vocabulary did not radically alter Friedmann’s views. Questions arise about how the intellectual itinerary of the founder of French labor sociology, who was shaped by the political trauma experienced by his generation, has lastingly affected this discipline.     

La crise du recrutement des lads-jockeys : l’essoufflement d’un système d’emploi corporatiste

How is the French labor market for lads organized (recruitment, careers, personnel management, retraining)? What changes are under way? A recent phenomenon - the vanishing of young lads with diplomas - helps answer these questions. Can this be explained other than by the discrepancy between dreams about this job and on-the-job reality? The latter can be understood only in relation to the economic and social changes in this working environment that have, in particular, threatened trainers’ positions. This happened during a period when the schooling of youth lasts longer and ends with a diploma even though this sector cannot absorb these young people. This difficult situation has several explanations. Working conditions have worsened (increasing precariousness, more stress, career obstructions) while young people have become more demanding, more critical and more qualified. Meanwhile, the old paternalistic system for managing personnel is falling apart.     

Maintenance of Urban Ethnic Boundaries: the French in St. Boniface*

The tendency to doom French Canadians outside Quebec to assimilation seems to be based on the premise that state boundaries with political and economic control over an ecological boundary are required in order for a population to be nationalized into a cohesive group. Although the French had early opportunities to dominate ecological, demographic, political and economic macro-structures in St. Boniface, they quickly lost out to the British. The French community has remained strong for 160 years by means of enclavic social factors such as residential segregation, institutional completeness, cultural identity, and social distance. French self-identification with social psychological factors such as a religious ideology, amidst rich historical symbols, is strongly supported by the status elite and a majority of French residents in St. Boniface. This enclave is changing to some extent but a distinct core of French identification remains. A resurgence of Franco-Manitoban identity is hardly taking place, but there is much evidence of reinterpretation and revitalization.     

La division sexuelle du travail chez les musiciens français

Data from a survey of French musicians conducted for the Ministry of Culture are used to analyze the processes producing inequality between men and women in music. Two models of a sexual division of labor coexist along with a differentiation depending on the style (learned vs. popular music). These two models closely link together working conditions, careers and the organization of home life for male and female musicians; and they underlie the construction of musicians', identities. In the world of popular music, bodily stereotypes of femininity (youth, seduction) and masculinity (the aestheticization of deviance, the bohemian life) dominate. In the world of learned music, a hierarchical model of masculine authority prevails with the figure of the conductor at the summit.