Le syndicat des travailleurs domestiques de Rio de Janeiro : un observatoire des transformations de l'emploi domestique au Brésil

This study of the major dimensions of actions undertaken by the labor union for household employees in Rio de Janeiro shows how the new “social rights” extended to these personal service workers has led to a new sense of what is “fair” and to an increase in lawsuits with employers. Given its place in labor relations courts, the union's position is ambivalent. Light is shed on the tensions between various categories of persons who visit the union's offices — tensions that tell us much about social relations. Attention is then turned to this small organization's role in labor courts: after cases have been heard, household employees often have a feeling that their rights have been upheld.     

Les « intermittents » de l'Église. Modalités d'emploi des personnels laïcs dans le catholicisme français

Given the shortage of priests, bishops have assigned permanent religious duties to several thousand laypersons, a majority of them women. Many of these persons have employment contracts. The employment conditions of this new type of permanent personnel tend to be unfavorable: assignments for a few years despite contracts of unlimited duration, part-time work and a nearly minimum wage. Various factors account for this fragility: the dire financial straits of French dioceses; ecclesiastical authorities, determination to present the clergy as the only fully legitimate, permanent personnel in the Church; and the attitude of laypersons who seem to be satisfied with their lot. The efforts to institutionalize this work have encountered difficulties with respect to both the labor code and the unexpected effects produced internally by the advocacy of a “culture of limited duration commitment”.     

« À votre service ! » La relation de service comme rapport social

Bringing the customer’s power into the analysis of relations in the service sector opens an approach that is original by comparison with existing studies, which either insist on the power wielded by counter clerks or else describes a peaceful coproduction of services. Analyzing “servicial relations” sheds light on both clerks’ and customers’ behaviors. Empirical research conducted in the French Post Office reveals the ambivalence — between “rendering a service” and “being at the service of” — in counter clerks’ relations to their jobs. Placed in a better position owing to recent changes in service companies, customers increasingly tend to give orders to clerks and sanction their work. Despite a weaker group spirit, clerks resist these strategies for turning them into servants by applying subtle rules and know-how.     

Comment confronter mobilité « subjective » et mobilité « objective » ?

The methods for analyzing objective social mobility and subjective mobility as perceived by individuals are reviewed in the case of two surveys: Trois générations by the French Old-Age Fund (CNAV, Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse) and Formation qualification professionnelle by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). These two surveys have formulated subjective mobility in quite different ways, but this observation also holds for objective mobility, which, for the purpose of comparison with respondents' subjective evaluations, is defined using specific procedures. A method is proposed for contrasting these two sorts of mobility based on classical mobility tables. When the latter are designed so as to cross three variables (social origins, destinations and average scores of subjective mobility), the spontaneous sociology that can be collectively detected in the assessments made by respondents turns out to be not very different from the scholarly sociology of social categories produced by sociologists. After showing that subjective and objective mobility vary coherently in relation to each other, an additional hypothesis is advanced to account for some discrepancies.     

Les groupements d'employeurs : la sécurité dans la flexibilité ?

An employer pool is an association that, formed under a French act of 1901, hires wage-earners who share their time between two or even three employers who are members of the association. The objectives of these pools are: to turn contingent or part-time jobs into steady, full-time occupations covered by permanent employment contracts; and to make the employer's need for economic flexibility compatible with the individual's need for security. The results of a survey conducted in two employer pools are used to examine actual practices by inquiring into the meaning of a "shared worktime" for wage-earners and by observing the various uses that these employers make of this work force and the new social forms that thus arise. Employees' intermittent presence in the firms and the triangular features of their employment relationship lead to socially distributed sets of constraints and resources, as well as a stronger individualization of work relations.     

La clôture comme seule protection ? Syndicats du spectacle et marché du travail dans l’entre-deux-guerres (1919-1937)

The case of performers in the entertainment industry during the period between the two World wars serves to test the hypothesis of a monopolistic closure, as workers try to improve their lot by restricting access to the labor market. In line with the predictions of this hypothesis in the sociology of professions, actors and singers did try to close the labor market by instituting a “professional card”. Contrary to expectations however, labor organizations of musicians sought to control pay scales and jobs by opening the market so widely that anyone entering it joined the organization. These two different strategies affected these groups’ identities by drawing legitimate boundaries and influencing the nature and degree of solidarity. Beyond these strategies, two prospects for emancipation contrast with each other: the professional one of an exclusive group among performing artists on stage and in song, and the wage-earning one of an inclusive group among musicians.     

Services publics et fractures de la ville. La « pensée publique » entre diversité, éclatement et souci du rapprochement

This review of publications, mostly written during the 1990s, examines the links between scientific expertise and public (in the first place central) authorities’ priorities with regard to public services in urban areas in France. The relations between “public services” and the “city” refer to a many-sided reality at the center of specialized discussions that do not lend themselves to generalization. The relations between these two subjects can be seen from three angles: the territorial supply of services; their relations with the environment; and the norms for thinking about and justifying the changes under way. Regardless of the angle chosen, three themes can be identified in talk about public services and urban areas: diversity, fragmentation and proximity. The publications examined in this review represent a mixture of heterogeneous studies, more or less dependent on requests from public institutions. These variable and varying requests provide evidence of the state’s hesitations about how to cope with social and urban changes.     

Syndicalisme et délitement du salariat artistique : la CGT et les groupes mobilisés autour du régime de l’intermittence

In a context of strong growth and intense social struggles related to the employment conditions of media industry worker on short-term contracts in France, attention is drawn to the difficulties that the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) has had organizing performers and stage hands in show business (cinema, theater, etc.). This labor union must deal with a large number of young professionals who pay no mind to the rules and norms related to wage-earning and no longer consider them to be a common good. Working in small groups that produce shows, these professionals regard their occupation as a vocation, value the hyperflexibility of their working conditions, pay scant attention to the distinction between employer and employees, and tend to deny the specific characteristics of their jobs and skills while referring, instead, to a blurry set of qualifications.     

Généalogie et évolution de la catégorie de « cadre » en Italie

Conceptions of the social world in industrialized countries use categories worked out in the course of a nation's history. In this respect, the notion of cadre for referring to both a concrete social group and a statistical, cognitive category turns out to be a French invention. From a societal perspective, why are there no cadres in Italy? Why is this sort of catchall category for referring to persons in the middle range of employees missing there? Although the notion crystallized through the French experience does not fit the Italian situation, we can inquire into it by examining the history of two close but distinct socioeconomic categories: quadri and dirigenti. A constructivist approach is taken to examining several aspects of the emergence of these categories in Italian society: the place of the institutions that defend and objectify them as a socioeconomic category; the expectations and aspirations that motivate them; the impact of historical and symbolical events in making these categories; and the role of sociologists who persist in analyzing Italian cadres by using quite different theoretical and ideological presuppositions.     

Brèves réflexions sur la reconnaissance d'un « droit à la différence alimentaire » dans le commerce international

We repeatedly hear that the World Trade Organization's rules (modified in 1994 to reinforce the principle of worldwide free trade) tend to inevitably uniformize culture in food, among other things. Whether in the case of bovine growth hormones or genetically modified organisms, WTO rules will ultimately impose a single food model as a universal reference mark. In France, these ideas crop up in talk about malbouffe (bad eating) and calls for a return to democratic choices or for instituting a fundamental “right” to freely choose food habits. Even though such talk has sometimes confused the issues, it has shed light on how the food question is presented in international trade. Increasingly, the issue is to defend national or regional values, or even choices about the type of society. What place do WTO rules reserve for these values ? Under what conditions can such values justify exemptions from free-trade rules and, ultimately, the maintenance of a “right to food differences”? As the European Union is thoroughly changing food legislation in line with its own concepts - the precautionary principle, the plurality and independence of procedures for evaluating foodstuffs, the well-being of animals, etc. - the answers provided to the foregoing questions will be decisive. - Special issue on Agriculture and food.     

Les rejetés de la modernisation

In Brazil unlike France two very split labour markets co-exist, the formal and the informal. On the formal labor market in Brazil, union rights prevail, and wage-earners are protected unlike in the informal labor market where none of this exists. Raising industry to an international level pushed many wage-earners out of the formal sector during the 1980s. Did they find jobs elsewhere? If so, in which branches of the economy? To provide answers, two files are crossed, their data having been made longitudinal. Dismissed workers’ trajectories from 1989 till 1995 in two branches and two regions are analyzed: the automobile industry in the São Paulo area and the petrochemical industry in the São Salvador (Bahia) area. These career trajectories shed light on how modernization has affected quite different labor markets; it also brings to the foreground the concept of a systemic restructuring of the labor market. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Voluntary turnover among non-supervisory casino employees

As gaming is expanding nationally and internationally, existing gaming operations are facing increased competition for employees with gaming experience. This study investigates the factors related to employee turnover in the gaming industry. Workers of six casinos in Reno, Nevada were surveyed concerning their work attitudes and turnover intentions, resulting in a sample of 492 observations. The sample represents all non-supervisory job types typically found in casinos. Pearson correlations and multivariate regression analysis were employed to investigate the relationships among turnover intentions and job satisfaction, specific satisfaction dimensions, organizational commitment, worker perceptions, pay, and labor market conditions. The results show that job satisfaction and organizational commitment are most strongly related to turnover. In contrast to previous findings, labor market conditions and pay play only a minor role in an employee's decision to quit. Instead, perceived lack of job security, satisfaction with supervision, and perceived employer concern with employee well-being emerge among the most important factors. The results imply that employers in the gaming industry can manage employee turnover by providing effective supervision that is based on employee participation and fair treatment of employees. Training of supervisors, therefore, may be a relatively inexpensive method of controlling employee turnover in casinos.     

Entre « passion » et incertitude : la socialisation au métier de footballeur professionnel

On the basis of a socioethnographic survey conducted in a professional soccer training center in France, the means of occupational socialization are analyzed in this demanding, captivating institution. Light is shed on how trainees appropriate this professional world and its requirements. As they enter this social universe, they encounter a key tension. On the one hand, training calls for a heavy investment that trainers and trainees experience as a “passion” and understand as being separate from the world of “ordinary” work. On the other hand, it is also a major source of uncertainty as to trainees’ prospects, given its intense selectivity and the few outlets in the labor market. It requires of trainees a strong commitment in time, body and spirit with prospects so uncertain that the course of training is seldom free from periods of soul-searching.     

Conflit de générations ou conflit d'organisation ? Un train peut en cacher un autre…

In a railway marshaling yard, relations between the two principal age-groups (employees in their fifties and young, recent hires) are very tense. Various persons set this down to an obvious generation clash. By observing on-the-job situations, we come to see how these tensions tie in with a reorganization of work that occurred when the yong people were hired. Members of these two groups interpret differently the organization of work and the rationale for cooperation between job stations. The explanation in terms of a “generation clash” overlooks the actual issues in an organizational conflict having to do with changes during the recent reorganization. It thus keeps us from noticing the threats against the personnel's statuses and the social and symbolic hierarchies underlying them.     

La maladie des coûts est-elle contagieuse ? Le cas des ensembles de musique ancienne

To complete traditional explanations of why the performing arts tend to run a deficit, the case of Early Music orchestras is examined. The usual mechanisms do not suffice to explain why these institutions suffer from the “illness of costs”. Two hypotheses are combined to complete Baumol’s model. For one thing the deepening deficit of Early Music orchestras is related to their professionalization; and for another, it is explained by their being simultaneously in two markets: the concert market and the musicians’ labor market, where they have to compete with subsidized orchestras.     

Le vol en interne : les vols commis par les salariés sur leur lieu de travail

The literature in the social sciences about theft by employees at the workplace is reviewed. As field studies and surveys based on personal accounts show, this deviant behavior is widespread in the world of work. Sociologists and anthropologists mostly interpret employee theft as a political way of resisting the injustice of on-the-job exploitation. In contrast, economists and the literature on management insist on the delinquency of theft and try to find the means whereby employers can preventively cope with dishonest salary-earners. Beyond this distinction, employee theft is worth studying in order to shed light on the complex salary-earning relationship.     

Un atelier d’écriture internationale : l’OCDE au travail. Éléments de sociologie de la forme « rapport »

The writing of a “transversal” report on employment at the OECD is examined by focusing not on the finished product but, instead, on the drafting of the report. This approach allows for exploring the dynamics of power at work inside the OECD. It opens toward broader considerations about how this type of international organization produces knowledge in economics and weaves relations, throughout the long process of drafting the report, with those who requested it. This article analyzes how economic issues are assembled through a succession of intermediate studies and reshaped through an asymmetrical competition between services. By making visible the process of constructing the position of “institutional author”, this analysis repositions on new grounds the problem of “influence”, which usually arises in organizations of this sort.     

Pour une sociologie des professionnels engagés : « Mondes de l’art » et militantisme contre la guerre en Irak aux États-Unis

This analysis of the mobilization of American artists against the war in Iraq emphasizes how their work situations have shaped their involvement. Regardless of political organizations and networks, or of the ideological dimensions of the anti-war cause, relations having to do with the work and occupational identities of these persons determined, in the first place, their actions and the positions they have adopted publicly. This article contrasts various “artistic subfields” and “patterns of activity” in order to understand the factors that have made it more or less tenable for these social actors to articulate the identities of artist and activist and, in some cases, to produce “political art”. The second part focuses on the “professional structuring” of this activism by showing how the current operation of artistic spheres — which have become more self-regulated, specialized and professionalized —tend to curb the confusion of issues that mixes aesthetic up with politics.     

Le travail vu par les assistés : éléments pour une sociologie des politiques d’insertion

The relations between “assistance” and “work” are seen from the viewpoint of the beneficiaries of welfare services for integrating them in the world of work. Material was collected during 70 semi-directive interviews with recipients of the minimal welfare payment program (RMI) who had valid “contracts of integration” in three local authorities in the Île-de-France region between 2005 and 2007. The relations of these persons to work differ as a function of their attachment to the norm of autonomy, their resistance to stigmatization and their guilt feelings. They very much depend on beneficiaries’ sociodemographic characteristics and quite diverse backgrounds and itineraries. Three types of relations to the world of work have been detected that enable us to empirically verify the postulate that the most disadvantaged categories have difficulty appropriating the currently widespread norm of individual autonomy.     

Formalization,collectivization, and the demand for union services

Formalized collective bargaining rather than individual employer-employee negotiation is the fundamental characteristic of a unionized labor market. Formalization involves the substitution of rules for employer discretion. Collectivization substitutes simultaneous decision making on behalf of all workers in a unit for a set of individual employee decisions. Formalization and collectivization are present in nonunion as well as union labor markets and their extent varies within as well as between these two sectors. In particular, individuals may negotiate where they belong in a union environment, and the presence of rules invites negotiation over their interpretation. Nevertheless, because formalization and collectivization are obvious concomitants of trade union organization, their costs to both employers and employees should explain the probability of union organization, as well as the incidence of such antecedents of the modern trade union as the Italian padrone who acted as foreman, pay-master, and employment agency for newly-arrived immigrants to the United States; and the Indianjamdar, a construction industry recruiter-foreman. Our occasional observations of union-induced costreductions may appear to counter the implicit assumption in much of the trade union literature that unions always induce suboptimal combinations of factor inputs and factor payments (nonunion firms could choose union-induced parameters on their own and do not). Because these cost reductions may be accompanied by increased costs imposed by unions, however, the cost reductions discussed below imply nothing about overall effects of unions on employers or employees. I wish to thank John Pencavel for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. For further analysis of these points, see Flanders (1968). See Epstein and Monat (1973) for a discussion of the services provided by labor contractors.