Abstract
This article considers a specific sub-type of non-standard employment—self-employment—through a particular type of cooperative in France: the Business and Employment Cooperatives (BEC), i.e., collectives of freelance workers. BECs aim to provide an indefinite employment contract—and the social protection associated with it—to these individuals who therefore become “salaried entrepreneurs.” To better understand the gray zones of work, where legal status, practices and identities are often disconnected, this inquiry is based on a qualitative approach to social actors' practices. It shows, on a meso level, how BECs “hijack” the standard wage-labor contract on the grounds that this is emancipatory and therefore drag it into a non-standard form of employment. In addition with this first shift between the legal framework and its interpretation, a second shift occurs as each member of the cooperative—a “false wage earner”—develops a singular relationship to the constraints related to such a contract. Through the notion of “praxis,” combining both objective and subjective dimensions of work, we are able to systematize the analysis of qualitative data and identify the factors that influence such a diversity of appropriations: the relationship to conflictuality and political competence. Finally, this article highlights the conditions under which social actors make a wide range of appropriations of common legal frameworks, whose flexibility requires us to consider employment relationships as variant and creative practices rather than as “perfect” or “deviant” forms.
Highlights
[We see] “a second way to the universal: no longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self ” (MerleauPonty, in Bachir Diagne, 2013, p. 16)
Wage labor still represents a major fraction of total employment, the standard employment relationship of the indefinite and fulltime labor contract is decreasing through several processes: new statuses (0-h contracts, micro-entrepreneurship), technological changes, and ideological changes in collective and individual preferences and expectations
As the French Labor Code underlines, the salaried entrepreneurs are employees of the Business and Employment Cooperatives (BEC), which is responsible for their state insurance contributions and information about their health and working conditions12
Summary
[We see] “a second way to the universal: no longer the overarching universal of a strictly objective method, but a sort of lateral universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self ” (MerleauPonty, in Bachir Diagne, 2013, p. 16). Some important evolutions have occurred within this dichotomy, as French jurist Supiot (2000) demonstrated These transformations have ended dualist labor approaches (insiders vs outsiders of labor markets; wageearning job vs self-employment, i.e., standard and non-standard employment relationships). The notion embraces objective constraints and subjective representations, and enables us to address the articulation between institutional frameworks and individual action at work (Dardot, 2015) This first argument feeds a second, which implies distancing oneself from the normative approaches of the gray-zone phenomenon. Like the “economically dependent autonomous worker” in Spain and the “auto-entrepreneur” in France, allow for more flexibility and pluriactivity They generate a greater precariousness; one of the main illustrations of this is the bogus self-employment which proliferates throughout uberization processes. It seems necessary to seriously consider the “various sub-types of nonstandard employment” as bogus/dependent self-employment is
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