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.     

Le temps du remue-ménage. Conditions d'emploi et de travail de femmes de chambre

It is now admitted that part-time work is a signal of inequality between the sexes, in both work and family. By focusing on cleavages among women, an analysis is made of how worktime and the company’s position as a subcontractor combine so as to produce inequality among wage-earners by assigning them heterogeneous statuses and thus forcing some of them to cope with precarious working, employment and living conditions. This study of the working and employment conditions of chamber maids in France focuses on those who work part or full-time in cleaning companies under contract with other firms. Inside this rather unskilled group of women, part-time work stresses the differences produced by subcontracting and worsens the inequality between stable, full-time employees and the women subcontracted at part-time who do the same job. These cleavages set off a strike among these part-time workers. Analyzing this labor dispute has shed light on the social relations running through the firm and on invisible issues in work and employment for these women with jobs in the shadows.     

Des « employeurs multiples » au « noyau dur » d'employeurs : relations d'emploi et concurrence sur le marché des comédiens intermittents

Managerial literature sometimes uses an ideal-type of contingent labor to describe what it imagines to be future changes in organizing work and labor. These changes would entail a shortening and, therefore, multiplication of labor contracts. Statistics on the intermittents du spectacle (an administrative category in France referring to performers as well as stagehands who work for the duration of a project in show business, television and the performing arts) are analyzed to show that the conception of work in the media industry, as reflected in the aforementioned writings, cannot account for the actual plurality of relations between these part-time employees and their employers. In the media industry labor market, two types of labor relations can be distinguished. The one is close to the ideal-type of an intermittent employee who has occasional relations with his employer, whereas the other is based on a “hard core” of employers with whom an employee has recurrent relations. This core significantly affects the number of engagements of these performing artists and contributes decisively to the stability of their careers.     

Les transformations de l'intégration par l'emploi: Regards croisés : France métropolitaine - île de La Réunion

Against a background of mass unemployment and the increasing precariousness of employment, the current changes in the labour market demand that we examine the previously central role of paid employment in social integration. If the individual now deprived of employment or having a temporary contract is by dint of this fact less included in society or is less secure by not having a permanent salary, is it to say that he embodies the face of the de-affiliated, of those who miss out on social benefits? Taking the example of the Reunion Island which has the highest level of unemployment and population covered by the minimum income (RMI: Revenu Minimum d'Insertion) in the country, this article endeavours to explain and understand how, in the context of a protective society and increasingly flexible employment market, new methods of social integration without and resulting from paid employment are being formed.     

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.     

Le télétravail des cadres : entre suractivité et apprentissage de nouvelles temporalités

Telework is often considered to be a means for making life at work and at home more compatible. Why do some wage-earners, in particular white-collar employees, choose it? Do they actually make a choice or simply adopt a solution “for want of anything better” in an organizational context with its limitations? In this case, what factors do they weigh against each other? Once they have opted for telework, how do these white collars manage to adjust their occupational and family lives? Is their aspiration to improve the balance between the two satisfied? Or do they run up against unexpected difficulties? Answers to these questions come out of two studies conducted among white-collar employees in different sorts of telework. Given the absence of institutional regulations governing the relation between life at home and at work, telework, far from leading to a more balanced life, jeopardizes the organization’s collective efficiency.     

Privatisation des télécommunications et relations de travail en Amérique latine

This article deals with the privatization of telecommunications in the three largest Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Labor unions have strongly affected the way telecommunications have been privatized in Latin America and its timing, but they have not been able to keep their traditional influence from waning. Comparing Argentina and Mexico brings to light opposite models of labor relations based, for the one, on the denationalization of management and loss of guaranteed jobs for wage-earners and, for the other, on the maintenance of control over telecommunications by local entrepreneurs and the preservation of guaranteed employment. The more recent privatization implemented in Brazil has fueled debate about the consequences on collective action in an era of open-market telecommunications. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Comment décrire ce qu’on ne voit pas ? Le devoir d’hésitation des juges de proximité au travail

How to describe work when much of it cannot be observed? This study of the activities of magistrates in a “natural” situation used an ethnological approach to observe cases from registration to hearings. Special difficulties cropped up during one phase: how to observe the deliberation when the judges, after having heard the parties during the contradictory phase of a penal procedure, adjourn and, among themselves, debate the case, weighing the pros and cons, before delivering a decision? The literature usually considers this “duty to hesitate” as an essential phase. But the judges in this survey sat alone on the court. Hesitations and turnarounds might occur; but doubts, inevitably an essential part of their work, arose during a phase of deliberation with oneself that left little empirically observable evidence and did not necessarily leave memories that these judges could easily bring up. How, then, to describe the “duty of hesitation” when it evaporates as we try to observe it in actual fact? This survey's strategy for responding to this situation is presented.     

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.     

Des carrières aux parcours… en passant par la compétence

Do the social uses of the notion of competence affect operatives’ careers? A linkage between competency-based-management and careers is not to be taken for granted when competence is seen in relation to changes in work. In France, “policies of competence” entail modifying the specifications for managing the future of wage-earners, since a rationale grounded on the idea of a career yields to one based on the notion of an itinerary. Firms have supported the latter as a way to make mobility more fluid and to ensure the recognition of qualifications. However, this rationale based on occupational itineraries runs afoul of the segmented in-house labor market, which unfailingly turns an itinerary into an obstacle course. As a result, careers are “deinstitutionalized”, a trend to be related to the gradual institutionalization of “secure itineraries” with incentives coming from public employment and training policies. Invoking competence in order to make itineraries secure is part of an argument about the “destabilization of employment” that justifies delegating to individuals the management of their future and legitimates the idea that employability is to be the major counterpart for motivating wage-earners. For lack of new regulations for work throughout the life course, the rationale of an itinerary risks making the marketplace the major source of (dis)order in personal destinies.     

How temporary is temporary employment in Spain?

I use a multinomial logit model and the Spanish Active Population Survey (EPA) for the period 1987–1996 to study labor force transitions of temporary workers. These workers hold fixed-term employment contracts, which Spanish labor law distinguishes from indefinite contracts. Since the EPA questionnaire allows the identification of workers with either type of contract, I use matched EPA files to analyze transitions from temporary to permanent employment and explore the extent to which workers holding fixed-term employment contracts tend to be trapped in temporary employment relationships. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. Pedro Albarrán-Pérez provided excellent research assistance.     

Les métiers flous du développement rural

Along with the notion of development, new jobs have emerged characterized by: a vague, overall definition; an ambiguity as to roles (especially in dealings with locally elected officials); makeshift statuses; and occupational itineraries that cannot be reduced to civil service careers. As this examination of their work over three decades shows, the autonomy of rural development agents has been related to a “phase of invention”, when the switch was made from rural planning to development. Role ambiguity still prevails and has even spread, owing to the social conditions of employment, to occupational itineraries. Given the cofinancing of public authorities’ “territorial actions”, we see a couple forming between elected officials, who want to take hold in an intercommunal territory, and development agents, who “create their jobs” by capturing subsidies. Over this 30-year period, a peculiar image of “fuzzy jobs” has emerged.     

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.     

La tournée des facteurs Normes gestionnaires, régulation collective et stratégies d’activité

The work of mailmen is mainly defined by the delivery routes to which they are assigned. Since this special organization of work grants them broad autonomy, the processes for delimiting, defining, and conducting routes must be analyzed by taking into account observations from three levels. The first one focuses on the French Post Office’s managerial standards, which, though increasingly determined by objectives for making a profit, have little impact on mail deliverers’ activities. The second centers around this occupational group’s own regulations, which stem from a hierarchy based on seniority and control over mail delivery and routes. The third level of observation takes into view the strategies for delivering mail that postmen adopt on their routes. These strategies reflect different relations to managerial objectives and to customers; and they reveal contrasting conceptions of the job of delivering mail. Emphasis is laid on the fact that the situations for working at lower levels in the service sector cannot be separated from the factors defining and organizing these situations.     

Le métier de pornographe : rhétorique, contrôle et savoirs d’un groupe professionnel discrédité

This article deals with the professionalization of heterosexual pornography in France since 1975. Although pornography is discredited by public authorities and lacks any institutionalized training programs, pornographers have developed an occupational rhetoric whereby they present themselves as the entrepreneurs of fantasy, claim sexual expertise and control a masculine, heterosexual business. They present the boundaries of sexual and gender identities as natural, and the professionalization of pornography relies on a differential distribution of the know-how underlying a sex-based division of labor. This professionalization of sexuality involves not only a work of legitimation for turning sex into a subject matter for pornography but also an appropriation by men of sexual know-how and knowledge. What defines the job of pornographers is not only the turning of consumers’ fantasies into images but also male control over female sexuality.     

Les transformations du marché du travail : un éclairage à partir de l’analyse des décalages entre offre et demande dans un système productif localisé

This new look at approaches to the labor market emphasizes that changes observed during the past twenty years are related to trends as much in supply as in demand. Analyzing both these sides is shown to be valuable for understanding the impact on labor market trends and shedding light on the tensions and contradictions between supply and demand. The mechanisms that have come into play during this period are analyzed in a local productive system, namely agribusiness in the lower Rhone valley in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region of France.     

Les politiques d'emploi et la transformation des normes : une comparaison européenne

Given the central orientation of the European employment strategy — adapt unemployment compensation systems so as to broaden access to jobs — the effects of policies in this field are examined by focusing on three axes: the impact on unemployment; the action on employment standards, and trends in the social regulation underlying these policies. A comparative view reveals how much national systems have been able to interpret EU objectives in their own way. This does not invalidate the pertinence of a European level of regulation,but it does expose the conditions for clarifying standards for public actions and leading actors to become involved in EU institutions, a source of legitimacy still to be constructed. This comparison of six national cases (Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom) sheds light on the importance of the social compromises that set the framework for job polices. The quality of occupational transitions is related to the ability of actors to jointly regulate employment policy and labor market standards. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Le temps de l'activité de la caissière : entre logique productive et logique de service

At first sight, the worktime put in by cashiers at checkout counters seems homogeneous, continuous and repetitive. An empirical study of hypermarket cashiers in France shows, on the contrary, that the time spent working is relatively discontinuous and diversified. It is similar to the time on the job put in by semiskilled workers in industry. What characterizes cashiers' work is their having to manage flows of both products and customers. Their worktime can, therefore, be understood as a compromise that comes out of balancing productivity with human relations, a compromise that sometimes causes conflict. By acquiring an “incorporated know-how”, cashiers manage to fill their assignment.     

L’erreur est humaine mais non professionnelle : le bûcheron et l’accident

Conscious of exercising a dangerous trade, lumberjacks in France pay special attention to training new recruits. The ability to notice dangerous work situations is a way to shelter themselves from accusations of occupational misconduct. But exercising control does not suffice to protect from the risks inherent in this job. Lumberjacks are sometimes exposed to dangers that, regardless of their skills, are unforeseeable. Strongly marked by a sense of responsibility, their discourse about the risks related to their line of work forms a system of protection — a defensive trade ideology — that enables them to work while accepting conditions rife with uncertainty. This system and the environment where it takes shape are examined herein.