Through the prism of self-employment, sociologist Sarah Abdelnour reveals the dynamics of the weakening of salaried employment. She explores its different facets, from its ideological and political issues to the realities experienced by actors who no longer distinguish their clients from their bosses.
As he closes Sarah Abdelnour’s book, the reader not only has the feeling of having explored the issue of self-employment, and this “from utopia to reality” as the book’s subtitle indicates. He also has the clear impression of having immersed himself in the current transformations of work and their political treatment. The scope and interest of the book lie both in the right distance at which the author holds her subject and in the diversity of scales at which she proposes to study it. The analysis of self-employment never appears here as an end in itself, as we grasp from the first pages the author’s desire to include the birth and uses of this system in a broader reflection on salaried employment, its challenges, its limits but also its “power” to use Bernard Friot’s expression. But Sarah Abdelnour does not use self-entrepreneurship as a pretext to ask these big questions, she truly makes it the basis of the analysis by dissecting its object, by scrutinizing it with finesse, from the public policy that constructs it to the imaginaries that it carries, including the uses that workers and employers make of it.
Ambiguous political support for self-employment
The structure of the book is both simple and effective. While the first part is devoted to the “Origins and political logic of the self-employed regime”, the second, entitled “Self-employed entrepreneurs, independent workers under constraints” therefore focuses on the population of self-employed entrepreneurs, the uses they make of the self-employed regime and the practices and relationships to work – and to politics – that these uses induce.
In these two parts, the ambivalence of the system, caught between entrepreneurship and workfarebetween “employers and survival economy”, is clearly highlighted. “Integration policy” for the left, policy of support for independence for the right, the construction of the self-employed regime is carried out thanks to these improbable alliances of which neoliberalism has the secret, from the liberal right to associations of integration through economic activity. The author shows well that the law of 2008, which creates the system, does not start from nothing but is on the contrary part of “around thirty years of public policies encouraging independent work as a form of partial response to unemployment” (p. 63). The consensus around “popular entrepreneurship” that was built at the beginning of the 2000s gradually led to the credo of “all entrepreneurs”, the desire to universalize entrepreneurship being symbolized by the choice of the term “self-entrepreneur” in 2008. Hervé Novelli, the father of the system, then Secretary of State for Trade, Crafts and SMEexplains to the National Assembly that this measure will allow “all French women and men, including employees and retirees, to start a complementary activity with a view to increasing their income.”
The bipolarity of uses
In the second part of the book, the author proposes to “go beyond the political declarations of intent” to meet these French men and women who have made the “choice” of self-employment. She draws on both framing data from INSEE and Acoss (responsible for collecting contributions from self-employed people), which she was able to partly use, and on around thirty interviews with self-employed people, conducted between July 2010 and May 2011. Mainly from salaried employment, these “neo-self-employed” workers stand out from the population of self-employed people by their lack of initial capital and family transmission. But here too, ambivalence is the order of the day. The author indeed observes from the outset a plurality of uses of this regime, characterized by a “bipolarization between a minority of bonus-type uses, and a majority of precarious situations, or even downward social mobility” (p. 171). At one pole, essentially composed of the least qualified and least protected workers, self-employment is an exclusive independent work, “while the accumulation of income is more important among stable employees, in the private as well as the public sector” (p. 178). Thus the uses of the regime redouble the gaps that structure the world of work.
The most qualified, already protected, draw additional income from it, and even unnecessarily duplicated social protection, while the most vulnerable, more often young people and women, seem to accumulate bits of string from a working society of which they populate the margins.Ibid.)
This is followed by a detailed typology of the entry modes and conditions of possibility of this “small independence”: accumulating income, managing unemployment, finding work and leaving employment. Between the two, the author will have devoted a dozen fascinating pages to what she calls the “great diversion”, namely the imposition by employers – both private and public – of the use of this status, thus reminding us that those most motivated by self-entrepreneurship are perhaps not those we think.
Finally, Sarah Abdelnour questions the effects of the diffusion of this system on work practices but also, more broadly, on relationships with institutions and the political representations of individuals. By testing the hypothesis of a “liberalization of society from below” and by closely observing the daily lives of self-employed entrepreneurs and their practices, she is interested in in fine to the way in which this regime participates more broadly in a new mode of governing behavior, a neoliberal mode in the sense of Foucault. Sarah Abdelnour takes up this passage from the courses at the Collège de France where the latter suggests that it is “the very life of the individual – with for example his relationship to his private property, his relationship to his family, to his household, his relationship to his insurance, his relationship to his retirement” which would make him “like a sort of permanent enterprise and multiple enterprise”. Foucault thus joins Bashung in shedding light on the title of the book…
Self-employment “a system completely against, but against, salaried employment”
“Completely against, but very much against, salaried employment” is the formula that best sums up Sarah Abdelnour’s view of self-employment. It constitutes the guiding thread of the book, the main argument that structures the entire demonstration. Self-employment is in fact “completely against” salaried employment in that its operation relies largely on the wage system, and this in multiple forms:
Self-employed people are still employees, were or will be employees in the future, they receive unemployment benefits or social security income, they rely on the salary of their spouse or parents. (p. 257)
The analysis of the modes of entry into self-employment and the uses that employers often make of it also highlights how this regime can constitute a real “disguised employment”: when the employer is the only client, whether he provides the equipment or sets the remuneration, the self-employed person is indeed the employee of another. Thus Blaise, a graduate in podiatry who uses indifferently in the interview he gives to the sociologist “my client” and “my boss” to designate the podiatrist for whom, and in whose premises, he makes soles.
While completely opposed to wage employment, this self-employed worker regime is nevertheless developing “against” it, insists Sarah Abdelnour, again on several occasions and from several angles. It is often presented first, in political discourse, but also in that of the actors, as a deliberate way out of wage employment. But it is also developing against the wage-earning society in that it “unravels it from below”. Thus, by arranging the accumulation of income and basing the worker’s situation on “individual resourcefulness”, this regime makes it more difficult, for example, to build workers’ collectives, and tends to weaken wage demands. The designers of the self-employed worker regime themselves have never hidden this offensive against wage employment, as Sarah Abdelnour emphasizes on several occasions. “This abolishes the class struggle in a certain way,” wrote Hervé Novelli and Arnaud Floch in 2009: “There are no more ‘exploiters’ and ‘exploited’. Only entrepreneurs: Marx must be turning in his grave.”
Based on a solid investigation, written in a very accessible style, direct but always reflective about the conditions of the investigation and what the data collected allows or does not allow, this work is intended to interest people well beyond the circle of sociologists of work, and even the small world of sociology. The analysis of the acceptability, even the desirability of a condition, ultimately, rather precarious, leads the sociologist to interesting reflections on the “double truth of work” and on self-exploitation that mobilize Bourdieu, Gramsci and Burawoy, and more broadly on the status of the speech of those surveyed in sociological analysis.
If sociology must take seriously the assertion of happiness at work and the individual autonomy of the self-employed people surveyed, we can nevertheless regret that the author did not delve further into the study, if not of the conflicts, at least of the dull, latent, multifaceted conflictuality at the very least, that we see emerging here and there in her field – from the rejection of “paperwork” to the exit from the system. How can we explain the shift from this overwhelming “Loyalty” or these few cases of “Exit”, to the “Voice” that is being heard today in the mobilizations of Uber drivers or bicycle delivery people? Is the development of platforms characterized by a singular use – or a particular experience – of the self-employment regime, more conducive to the mobilization and reconstruction of collectives? Or should we think that after a few years of symbolic victory of “all self-employed”, we would witness a counter-offensive of the wage-earning society, buried too quickly? We are therefore impatiently awaiting the forthcoming publication of the ongoing investigations, announced in the book, on these new terrains.