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France’s labour bill: insecure jobs, vulnerable companies

Claude Didry, sociologist, director of IDHES at ENS Paris-Saclay and specialist in the sociology of labour and labour relations, analyzes the El Khomri labour bill and its implications.

Why is protest against the El Khomri bill continuing despite the amendments that have been made to it?

The fact is, this bill challenges the very principles of labour law, revealing a truly political agenda.

The problem is no longer its being amended in successive versions that nuance the scope of certain paragraphs. It's the diagnosis this agenda is based on.

The political agenda of the labour bill

The labour bill is intended to "reform the labour legislation inherited from the industrial era" so as to deal with the major social changes imputed to globalization and digitization and leading to a "service society". Its objective is supposedly to facilitate companies' adaptation to an uncertain environment, by replacing job security with “individual employment security” for employees who will be required to change jobs throughout their lives.  

As such, some economists see this bill as the answer to an increase in job insecurity that specifically affects young people, who are blocked in their access to permanent employment by older and more stable employees.

For these economists, the bill allows insecurity to be shared by limiting the legal risks of termination of employment, which in the end brings permanent contracts closer to forms of insecure contract.

However, it is disturbing to read from the advocates of the "single contract" that "90 percent of total jobs are on permanent contract". This assertion is not very far from INSEE figures, which have the share of permanent contracts out of total jobs stable at around 76.5 percent from 1984 to 2014.

These figures highlight the radical nature of a bill that aims to increase employee mobility through simplified redundancy procedures, offset by “individual employment security”.

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