Uncertain work

Intermittency at work. Contrary to what the title of Olivier Pilmis’s work may suggest at first glance, this is not an additional book on intermittent workers in the entertainment industry. Or rather not exclusively. In this work taken from a sociology thesis defended in 2008, the author compares the case of intermittent entertainers and that of freelance journalists. Beyond their specificities, they have in common that they sell their labor force on markets that the author describes as “ uncertain »: discontinuity of employment is the rule and great uncertainty reigns over the quality of the goods exchanged there. The author explicitly places his approach in a research program of economic sociology, and more precisely in that of the Weberian sociology of markets. It thus favors a morphological approach, which consists of describing the actors who make up a market and characterizing the links, more or less stable over time, more or less competitive, that they maintain between them. To do this, it relies on around fifty interviews, conducted mainly with intermittent actors and freelance journalists, and on the use of longitudinal data collected from social protection organizations in the sector – the Leave Fund. spectacle for the former, Audiens for the latter.

Intermittent actors are salaried performers engaged under a fixed-term contract known as “ of use », most often for a short duration equivalent to a project – a play, a television series, a feature film, etc. They are paid at “ stamp », a term which designates a package equivalent to a 12-hour day, or 8 hours from five consecutive days of work for the same employer. Freelance journalists write articles more or less regularly on behalf of press companies. If they are most often engaged through purchase orders and remunerated according to the number of signs or pages produced, the Industrial Tribunal frequently reclassifies these commitments as fixed- or indefinite-term contracts. Beyond the differences specific to the two professions and sectors of activity, these two categories of employees are considered as employees by the legislator, since laws passed, respectively, in 1969 and 1974. Besides that this is of a national exception – both are considered in most other countries in the world as independent workers – intermittent work and freelancing confer on individuals a significant degree of autonomy which makes the criterion of “ legal subordination » usually used to define the salary ratio. Based on this observation, Olivier Pilmis recalls that the development of discontinuous employment in the cultural worlds – the number of intermittent actors tripled between 1987 and 2007, freelance journalists represented one in five press card holders in the 2000s compared to one in fifteen forty years earlier — gave rise to divergent political and scientific interpretations. To the discourses which consider these particular forms of employment as a sign of the generalization of “ precariat “, are schematically opposed by those who see it as a manifestation of the extension of non-routine forms of work, a source of personal accomplishment. This beneficial context allows the author to remind us that job instability does not in itself constitute an obstacle to fulfillment at work.

However, these are less the speeches focused on the “ project work » than its concrete organizational modalities which interest the author. Thus, while restoring the specificities specific to each of the two sectors of activity studied – production is continuous and supported by organizational structures in the press, unlike live performance – Olivier Pilmis recalls that “ recruitment in the worlds of dramatic arts and freelancing is an operation that is all the more delicate as they present themselves as “open markets” » (p. 65). This recurring indigenous discourse, in addition to maintaining a permanent reservoir of suitors, signals that access to these markets is weakly regulated, or rather that this regulation only rarely takes the usual channel of school certification. This is particularly true for actors, whose initial training often offers less return compared to professional experience. In order to regulate the imbalance between supply and demand for employment, unions attempted from the 1930s to exclude “ amateurs » of the market by notably setting up a professional card system: if this selection mechanism fizzled out among performing artists, it was perpetuated among journalists, such that freelancers were not able to claim the Obtaining this card only from 1974. The uncertainty which reigns in these markets is not only due to the weak institutionalization of access criteria. It is also explained by the fact that value is based on the capacity of the labor force – the artists, the freelancers – to demonstrate originality, and on the singularity of the goods – the works. Using the terminology of “ the economy of singularities » developed by Lucien Karpik, the author writes that, on these “ markets-judgments “, “ the choice of an exchange partner does not proceed from a decision based on the criterion of price (…) To know what an actor or a freelancer is “really worth”, the best solution, if not the only one , is to engage them. » (p. 109). In other words, the value of production and producers can only be establishedex-post, once the work is done, which makes anticipation of the benefits of the pairing particularly difficult.

Therefore, how do the supply and demand for employment match up on these “ uncertain markets » ? It is to this question that Olivier Pilmis devotes most of his remarks. While emphasizing that freelancers and actors most often maintain brief employment relationships with their respective employers, he distinguishes two matching regimes: that of simultaneity suits the drama market, to the extent that actors tend to accumulate short-lived relationships with a large number of employers ; that of exclusivity corresponds more to the freelance market, since journalists maintain fleeting but successive relationships with a limited number of employers who concentrate the activity. The identification of these two ideal-typical forms of exchange should not make us forget that all employment relationships do not weigh in the same way in careers, far from it: thus, more than a quarter of intermittent actors « do their hours » thanks to a “ hard core of employers », including a principal ; for freelancers, working regularly with the same employer not only provides access to certain material benefits, but also constitutes a guarantee of reliability, an indicator of quality for employers. This concentration of activity on a limited number of employers, as advantageous as it may be, nonetheless remains dangerous: the breakdown of the relationship can in fact compromise the continuation of the activity. From this point of view, unemployment compensation makes it possible to partially compensate for the uncertainty which results from the discontinuity of commitments and remuneration. Although freelance journalists and intermittent actors can both claim this as employees, their situations are not equivalent in this area: while the former are most often unaware of how it works, the latter are more frequently familiar with it. For intermittent actors, the payment of unemployment benefits is in fact more akin to what Bernard Friot refers to as “ socialized salary ”, than a temporary replacement income. Here we see a significant difference between these two populations: the intermittency between employment and compensated unemployment constitutes in some way the horizon “ normal » of the career of an actor in France, where, for journalists, the status of freelancer is rather a route to a permanent position within an editorial staff.

By comparing intermittent work and freelancing, Olivier Pilmis manages to go beyond the aporias of the sectoral monograph: comparing these two forms of hyper-flexible employment offers a fruitful prism through which to glimpse the contemporary transformations of wage employment. The work also constitutes an important contribution to the sociology of market exchanges: objectifying the modalities of pairings on two of these “ uncertain markets “, the author shows in particular that in the absence of a stabilized consensus on the “ quality » of what is exchanged, establishing an employment relationship over time is the best way to reduce uncertainty. From this point of view, we would have liked to know more about the internal structuring of the freelance and dramatic arts markets, and in particular about the aesthetic conventions — literary and artistic — which prevail in the different segments of these markets. This would make it possible to better understand the levers and obstacles to the movement of freelancers and actors between these different spaces, which we understand is not obvious. More generally, one might have expected the author, given the Weberian affiliation in which he is part, to analyze more precisely the way in which the judgment of market actors is equipped. Indeed, we do not always understand precisely how they manage to reduce the uncertainty that weighs on the evaluation of cultural goods. In this regard, the analysis would undoubtedly have benefited from giving more importance to intermediation systems which aim to reduce this uncertainty, particularly with regard to the dramatic art market: we are thinking in particular of the system of audition and to certain intermediaries in the artistic labor market such as actors’ agents. Finally, certain dimensions of the careers of intermittent actors and freelance journalists could have been usefully clarified. This is particularly the case of the interpenetration of personal and professional scenes, which the author mentions several times. In these worlds where professional commitment is most often experienced and expressed in the mode of vocation, it thus reminds us that the partners of the exchange frequently form emotional bonds which make the breakdown of the exchange more costly. In the same way, we understand that the personal life, and particularly romantic life, of individuals contributes to structuring the organization of “ project work “. On this point, the interviews would probably have made it possible to further highlight this overlap and its repercussions on the pairings. These few elements of discussion in no way diminish the interest of Olivier Pilmis’s work, which here delivers a stimulating and original contribution to the sociology of labor markets.