Évaluer le temps de travail hors les murs. Incertitudes et tensions chez les visiteurs médicaux de l’industrie pharmaceutique

Abstract

This article focuses on a common situation, that of employees working away from their business premises, usually salespeople meeting clients. Combining ethnography, statistics and archival research, it questions the social effects of working hours that are not directly measurable — and therefore approximate — through the example of pharmaceutical sales representatives. These effects arise from two distinct types of uncertainty. First, measuring the working hours of sales representatives by counting tasks creates a mismatch between actual working time and statutory working time. This gap opens up the possibility of collective protests against this measurement and of power struggles between employers and trade unions to alter it in their best interests. In return, the method of estimating hours structures working time, which proves to be both highly unequal across the profession and on average higher than statutory working hours. Second, the work that pharmaceutical representatives do leaves few traces, generating both uncertainty about the tasks reported and leeway in this measurement process. The power of reps to control their working hours is subject to a range of forms of regulation by employers and by peers, which manifest themselves by trials and tensions in the working collective.