1From the 1930s to the 1980s, a standardized schema of professional statuses was forged and reforged in the corporate sector. The old gulf between white- and blue-collar workers was consigned to the past, progressively replaced by a structure based on more stable legal status. Permanent contracts (known as CDIs in France) became the norm, not without creating friction in certain quarters, as the most suitable arrangement for meeting the needs of modern industry. This was the beginnings of the era of collective bargaining (which escalated after 1936) and, eventually, protection against dismissal (thanks to legislation passed in 1973 and 1975). In January 1978, the evolution was complete as the majority of French workers began receiving their salaries on a monthly basis. These changes were very obviously modeled on the public sector. Over the course of the 1970s, the new salaried society entered a critical period, overshadowed by redundancies and an explosion in “nonstandard” forms of work.

2A paradox has since ensued: the workforce has grown increasingly fragmented even as a new order has emerged. It is as if this new diversity has given rise to a more loose-knit corporate structure, incapable of inspiring the same sense of unity. This is both an economic and a cultural shift, as generations Y and Z have joined the labor force with new ideas about the meaning of work. [1] Still, the overall picture remains one of job security and permanent contracts, enjoyed by 86.5 percent of private-sector employees. [2] Wolfgang Lecher’s gloomy predictions seem a long way off. [3] He anticipated that the labor market would change dramatically in the 1980s, resulting in a solid core of permanent employees (25 percent), surrounded by an inner ring on less stable five-to-ten-year contracts (another 25 percent), and a far more diffuse outer ring left to navigate a snarl of precarious mixed employee/contractor arrangements (50 percent).

3As the lines have become blurred and a constellation of hybrid arrangements has emerged, it feels like the old order is rapidly breaking down. Here, it is worth pausing briefly to consider the case of the “permatemp.” The permatemp is a human stopgap, stepping in to cover a range of duties whenever required—casual work on a permanent contract. France also has a regulated “wage portage” system, where external contractors are treated as nominal employees. Not to mention the legal miasma inhabited by Uber drivers. The landscape has become so complex that, in March 2015, François Rebsamen, France’s labor minister at the time, told a senate hearing that: “An employment contract does not necessarily entail a subordinate relationship between employee and employer: it is a mutual agreement between two people acting on their own free will.” [4] While legally dubious, this does make at least some sense from a sociological perspective.

Real security and everything else

4In reality, there is no clear demarcation between permanent employees and the rest. It is more of an undulating spectrum, from genuine job security to everything else. Those without a permanent contract can be grouped into three categories: the insecure, the pseudo-secure, and the former secure.

Conflicting desires: autonomy and cooperation

10Just to be absolutely clear: my intention is not to endorse a narrative of newfound corporate oneness, but rather to highlight an evident tendency toward renewed cohesion under the shattered surface of collective work. Even ten years ago, a study by the French Ministry of Labor revealed that “a majority of employees on short-term contracts say they feel just as much a part of their companies as those in permanent positions.” [12] Today, all nonpermanent workers are exposed to this dynamic.

11The growing desire for autonomy [13] is being satisfied as much by forms of sole proprietorship, freelancing, and wage portage as by traditional fixed-term and temporary contracts, consistent with the “artist” profile defined by Pierre-Michel Menger: “Strong commitment to one’s craft, significant freedom of action, an expectation or demand for flexibility, trade-offs between material gain and other, often nonmonetary, rewards.” [14]

12Generations Y and Z tend to reject traditional authority based on status, which is not the same as a competence-based authority founded on a mutual understanding that teams will follow their manager’s lead. [15] What matters to them is the ability to express their creativity within a legal status that strikes a happy medium between full independence and affiliation with the goals of a start-up or platform, giving them a kind of semi-autonomy. In theory, this arrangement ensures a baseline level of financial security, albeit with the obvious risk of sleepwalking into the veiled servitude of the Uber driver or Deliveroo courier, not too far removed from the exploitation suffered by textile and ironworkers in the nineteenth century.

13We might speak of the emergence of a mixed model of collective work, bringing together—in the logic of networks and coworking—both salaried employees and a growing number of external collaborators, directly involved with the company’s project and even subsumed within its operational structure in a form of internalized subcontracting. The future belongs to the media lab or fab lab, spaces where workers can pool their knowledge and skills to create new tools and software. The ethos can be likened to that of a jazz orchestra, where musicians play both with and against the orchestra: a new metaphor for the uneasy synthesis between individual and collective. On the whole, this works fairly well—but a craving for autonomy can also be answered by hopping from one short-term contract to another, as highlighted some time ago by Catherine Faure-Guichard’s [16] innovative study that, at the risk of ruffling feathers, established that there really is such a thing as the “voluntary” temp. [17] Faure-Guichard identifies three main profiles: the “moonlighter” (intérim d’appoint), looking to supplement his or her regular income but not reliant on a second job to make ends meet (15 percent of the panel); the “career builder” (intérim tremplin professionnel), keen to diversify his or her experience with a view to securing a permanent contract (almost 25 percent); and the “professional nomad” (intérim par choix), well qualified, often further on in life, who deliberately seeks out temporary positions as a lifestyle choice that affords an agreeable balance between work and free time. This is by no means to downplay the struggles of the reluctant majority of temps, forced to traipse from one precarious post to another for want of other options.

14At the same time, following a phase of hyperindividualized working relationships, more and more managers are realizing how powerful cooperation can be in fostering a productive environment that generates real economic returns. This could ultimately be the catalyst for a shake-up of prevailing perceptions of the economic and social spheres, as advocated by Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009 for her work demonstrating that strategic cooperation is more efficient than market forces or state intervention.

15We must be wary of settling into an overly optimistic view of reality, which could cause us to lose sight of the intransigent forces hastening the fragmentation of collective work and further entrenching the dominant forms of negative precarity. We can, however, be assured of one thing: a new horizon of professional clusters, more cohesive and more diverse, will have all the more chance of becoming a reality if we succeed in finding a new equilibrium between economy and society. That’s the big challenge!