Группа авторов

Employability and Industrial Mutations


Скачать книгу

and eventually returning to salaried employment, are becoming more frequent, whether it is a question of itineraries over time or of accumulation, as the same person may be salaried part-time and self-employed for the rest of his or her working time. The network can integrate as well as exclude, and the employability of platform workers is called into question every day by the evaluations of clients and the platform itself. The trans-status dimension then leads us to an employability “beyond wage employment”, to use Alain Supiot’s expression, where the capacity for initiative can meet success as well as self-exploitation.

      Another dimension, barely sketched in the three contributions, is the set of exit-type behaviors in the face of voice-type practices. Economics is at the forefront here, since it is concerned with the unemployed and their capacity to negotiate on the labor market, which is often very weak in a context of massive unemployment. To make people accept wage cuts, the degradation of working conditions and the precariousness of employment without any prospect of recovery, is then an option that the public employment services risk practicing by default or by political choice. The debate here is complex, since many public policies, particularly in France, aim to compensate for the effects of a labor cost deemed excessive by some employers through employment subsidies. A distinction must be made here between, on the one hand, general policies to lower labor costs, which carry the risk of weakening the attractiveness of workers who would be better supported by vocational training policies, a pessimistic and ultimately stigmatizing signal, and, on the other hand, targeted and massive subsidies aimed at reintegrating a category of workers by putting them back into employment at a high price, a voluntarist signal.

      But another type of exit behavior, on the contrary, shows a very good capacity for negotiation: emancipatory employability can be manifested by an individual’s ability to leave a company to develop in another. It would be wrong to oppose exit and voice here. It is qualified and self-sufficient workers with redeployable skills who have the best chance of making their point of view known in the event of restructuring. And the company that favors the transferability of qualifications can certainly lose workers whose employability it has developed, but it can also find others who are equivalent, if it operates in a territory or a sector that has developed such guaranteed mobility. The question then becomes one of the collective controls over the labor market as much as over companies.

      Taking into account experiences of entrepreneurial creation in addition to work as an employee, oblique itineraries, clarification of sorting and counter-sorting practices, validation, and also invalidation and rehabilitation both on the labor market and within companies: these less explored dimensions converge towards a demand for collective control of the labor market as well as of companies, aimed at countering excluding polarizations and guaranteeing sufficient opportunities for the future. We can then come full circle, by returning to our starting point, that of the unfair and inefficient transfer of the burden of adaptation onto individuals, characteristic of truncated versions of employability. Individual initiative and risk-taking, whether they set themselves market or non-market objectives, must be valued and equipped with a set of institutions and guarantees. In particular, pressure should be brought to bear on companies or organizations that do not play the game, and the complementarity between exit and voice, which is rarely given and most often has to be constructed, should be used to open up the space for individual choice.

      Economics can be interested in the conditions under which companies practicing employability based on capacity can develop and their practices spread; just as it can seek out the conditions of organization of the labor market that allow companies and their employees to move towards protected mobility. Symmetrically, sociology – and psychology with it – can look more deeply into the individual and collective support points from which each person can benefit in order to negotiate with others and with him or herself at the bifurcation points of a personal and professional itinerary, whether in the company or in an employment agency. Management can work, among other things, on the meeting between the tools for identifying employability internally and those implemented by placement agencies and training organizations: skills directories, sectoral forecasts, bridges between branches or diplomas and so on.

      The particular context of the publication of this book, with the challenges arising from the coronavirus health crisis, seems to relegate the concerns we have just reviewed to the background. This is not the case, and the numerous job losses and restructurings that are announced for the following years show, on the contrary, a challenge that is that of the collective construction not only of employment, but also of autonomous and emancipating employability understood simultaneously as a series of intertwined public practices and guarantees, a “total organizational fact” to be extended and reinforced, a “managerial imperative”, in short as a central political issue in our society.

      Introduction written by Bernard GAZIER.

      1

      Employability and Public Policy: A Century-long Learning Process and Unfinished Process

      Understood as the ability to obtain and keep a “normal” job, that is, one that is not protected, employability is a century-old term that is being used more and more widely. It finds a natural field of application in the context of job renewal: rather than protecting a worker in a job, it is advisable to develop his or her professional capacity to adapt to future jobs, his or her employability.

      For a long time, it was a concept developed and used by social and health practitioners confronted with the differentiated care of the unemployed: social workers, placement office agents, administrative authorities, doctors, trainers and so on. Researchers or specialists in an academically recognized discipline such as economics, sociology, education sciences or human resources management, came to grips with it later, and extended it to all categories of active workers, whether in employment or not.

      But the context of the early 2020s, with the health crisis and its repercussions on the economy and employment, as well as the increasingly pressing challenges of the environment, provides renewed justification for using the term employability. Indeed,