The movement of intermittents of the show against the reform of their compensation regime has given rise to an original experience of citizen expertise. This work carried out in collaboration with researchers led to the development of a counter-proposition recommending the implementation of a new compensation model applicable to all employees in a discontinuous employment situation.
In the spring of 2003, the intermittents of the show opposed the project to reform their compensation regime imposed on behalf of the deficit of the Unédic. This reform did not only restrict the conditions for the opening of rights to unemployment compensation, but more fundamentally replaced a logic of individualization and capitalization for the logic of mutualisation to the foundation of the French model of social protection. The book by Antonella Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato constitutes both the product and the story of a moment of this conflict, that of an investigation carried out jointly by researchers from the Matisse team of the Center for the Sorbonne (Paris 1 University) and the actors of the conflict (coordination of intermittent and precarious (Cip)) ; Association of friends of intermittent and precarious). While delivering another expertise than that of the official experts, this work resulted in the development of an alternative compensation model making possible the reappropriation of flexibility in mobility chosen for all the employees affected by the discontinuity of employment.
Most of the expertise commanded by the Ministry of Culture, mainly focused on accounting realities, led to a close diagnosis: the crisis of the compensation regime resulted from the presence of too many intermittent workers on the market, which caused a multiplication and extension of unemployment periods. The responses to be provided then appeared relatively simple: by limiting the number of intermittents (by raising the access threshold) and by promoting stable employment we reduce discontinuity and, consequently, the periods to compensate.
Faced with these institutional expertise which excluded the main interested parties from the development of knowledge on themselves and decisions concerning their lives, the original system of collaboration and co-production between researchers and members of the coordination of intermittent and precarious people opposed an expertise based on the rehabilitation of local knowledge and the retreat of the experience lived in accordance. decision.
The intermittents thus moved from the status of “ profane “To the one” specialists »: Unions of discontinuous employment, labor and employment sociologist, economists of financing issues for the compensation plan (p. 50). Shared and set in series, isolated experiences gave rise to the formation of a corpus of knowledge on the distribution of wages, on organizational practices, on employment management and social protection. Then emerged questions that the mandated experts did not ask and first of all that of the fundamental function of the compensation regime which is not limited to the financing of flexibility. Admittedly, this scheme serves companies that can adjust the payroll to their order book while being assured that they will have an available labor pool thanks to frictional unemployment that they help to maintain. But this is not its only function or perhaps its main function. This compensation plan first of all has a role in socializing salary by redistribution of resources which compensates for major wage inequalities observed in the sector. Then, it provides a guarantee of continuity of income and social rights while employment is discontinuous. Finally, it constitutes the support for the reproduction of working, training and living conditions of employees.
This point appears essential. For intermittents as for many “ precarious intellectual », The working time goes far over time for employment. This observation is entirely contained in the remark of a theater decorator: “ I work all the time and I am employed from time to time (P. 94). The unemployed time is not unoccupied. It is a time of training, improvement of know-how, preparation, project assembly and job search. What the compensation scheme is remunerated is therefore not idleness, but invisible work that employers appropriate free of charge since they only pay the finished product according to a logic of service. This condition is not specific to the intermittents of the show or other precarious intellectual workers. It is the common lot of all employees in a discontinuous employment situation who, because we refer to them the risks of the market, are constantly looking for contracts, live in the uncertainty of the next day and are ordered to build their employability by themselves. And their number is called upon to grow.
Because if the current employment system is not characterized by intrinsic and generalized instability, the authors insist that employment policies no longer seek to develop employment “ typical (In Permanent full -time) but to develop the employment rate by normalization and institutionalization of the courts. It is therefore understandable that the intermittent compensation regime could have constituted an anomaly to be eliminated at the time when the Mouvement des Entreprises de France (Medef) launched his social refoundation project. We had to avoid being able to be inspired by it to rethink the general regime because while social refoundation aimed to make social protection a land of capitalist accumulation (by personal insurance), an instrument of government of the labor market and the central element of a behavior control system, the intermittent regime could have been the means for employees to resist the injunction to become entrepreneurs of themselves and mobility as well as to increase their autonomy vis-à-vis employers by increasing their negotiation power. Indeed, in employment situations characterized by the tension between the freedom to contract and the uncertainty of the next day, the fact that employees can benefit from an institutionally guaranteed income of income allows them not to accept any work to any and thus reduces the power of employers. In the absence of such security, the reduction of uncertainty necessarily involves complete submission to the requirements of companies thus canceling any freedom to contract.
Faced with the reform of their compensation regime, the intermittent workers grouped within the Cip (Coordination of intermittent and precarious) and researchers who participated in their citizen expertise have developed a “ New model Whose economic viability has been tested. This allows authors to assert that under cover of accounting and economic arguments, this reform is above all political. It is the expression of a government rationality whose interventions aim to withdraw any autonomy from the social in the face of the economy by the extension of the criteria for the evaluation of the market and the company to all other activities. This is why the authors can say that the scope of the movement of intermittent workers and their counter-proposals exceeds their only categorical claims. THE “ New model Compensation that they proposed would thus represent a point of support for mobilization strategies for the acquisition of new rights and for the implementation of a social protection model breaking with the criteria of economic rationality. This model would be based on pooling, socialization of salary rather than individualization and capitalization. In this way, employees would be equipped with new institutional safetys which, in situations marked by the discontinuity of employment, would replace the individual security of employability as well as for fragile logics of loyalty between employers and employees which are based on interpersonal relationships of allegiance, dependence and domination. Beyond that, such a social protection regime which poses the continuity of income as a right in the same way as health would present itself as a tool at the service of another development model.