It may look as if nothing has changed. Government figures for the last quarter of 2014 show that only 7.6% of French employees are on fixed-term CDD contracts (1), suggesting that the coveted CDI, a permanent employment contract unlimited in time, is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of employees.
But according to Sophie Robin-Olivier, a specialist in flexible work contracts who is a professor of law at Paris Sorbonne University, hiring under short-term, fixed-period contracts – excluding temporary jobs – represented 84% of all hiring last year. That figure has risen from 73% in 1999. The trend towards insecure, discontinuous employment is therefore solid and real enough, without even counting temporary jobs, CDDs used instead of permanent contracts, or the self-employed workers who may take the place of permanent staff.
Indeed, the government now looks set to go further and remove some of the existing security that surrounds the permanent CDI contracts. Following the ruling Socialist Party's heavy defeat at last weekend's local elections, prime minister Manuel Valls has announced he is considering changes to the terms of CDI contracts – when used by small and medium-sized firms - to make them more flexible. “Bosses should not feel as if they are bound hand and foot,” said Valls.
Yet despite the flexibility of work contracts that are already in place – and which are being used in growing numbers - unemployment figures remain stubbornly high. The official count of the registered unemployed in France rose by 12,800 people in February to 3.494 million, according to labour ministry figures published on Wednesday March 25th.
The widespread use of short-term work contracts has not just failed to reduce unemployment. It is also a problem because this type of contract does not, in practice, lead to stable jobs. Even the targeted, subsidised schemes that successive governments have brought in and adjusted, such as emplois d'avenir ('jobs for the future'), contrat d'accès à l'emploi ('access to employment contracts') plus others have failed to achieve their goals. Instead, what they have done is help create a pool of part-time, often poorly-paid, workers. “Subsidised contracts were a response to the idea that flexibility for the most vulnerable was a vehicle for providing access to employment. In fact, this is far from being clear,” says Robin-Olivier.
People with patchy work records often lose out when it comes to rights or entitlements because the practice of granting exemptions under labour laws has become the norm, undermining established social conventions. “We know roughly how intermittent [employment] in the cultural sector works, it is an officially sanctioned form of discontinuous work, even if it is constantly under attack,” says a member of the Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d'Île-de-France organisation, who does not wish to be named. This group advises and campaigns for people with intermittent work contracts in the Greater Paris area. “For all the other [workers on insecure contracts], who are registered under the general regime (2), it is hard to find out what is going on.”
The group also cites the perverse effects of so-called 'rechargeable rights' to unemployment benefit that were brought in last October, supposedly to allow people with intermittent work records to accumulate entitlement to benefits the more they work. But in practice, the reform has resulted in sharply-reduced benefits, as Mediapart has reported (see story in French here).
Between jobs, those with short-term contracts must report to Pôle Emploi jobless centres across the country, even though they are in employment most of the time. “More than anger, we see a lot of incomprehension,” says Yannick Dennebouy, who works in a Pôle Emploi centre in Avranches, Normandy, in north-west France. “People come back to sign on two or three times a year. The mass of pay slips to sort through also adds to the time for handling claims and causes delays or blocked payments. This also raises questions over how we can help them in their search for a job.”
Dennebouy, a representative for the union SNU-Pôle emploi, highlights another alarming outcome of the latest negotiations on unemployment benefits. Previously an employee who had voluntarily left a job could receive benefits on a case-by-case basis as long as he or she was actively looking for a job. But no longer. “If someone resigns from a job after a week, for example, they can lose two years of rights they acquired previously,” he said.
People who receive income support - RSA (Revenu de Solidarité Active - Active Solidarity Income) - are also struggling to cope with the changes. Besides broadening the financial base of this aid, the reform the government announced last October also aims to scrap the existing two payments, an annual premium for being in employment and the RSA-Activité, which allowed people to claim financial aid if they had very low salaries. They will be replaced by a single 'activity premium' which will also be available to people under 25. Yet, so far, only 32% of people who could benefit from this type of aid have applied for it, because of the lack of information and because people are discouraged by the weight of administrative formalities involved. And the greater the number of employers a person has had, the greater the complexity.
“When a person is socially vulnerable, employment is vulnerable,” says François Soulages, president of Alerte, which groups together about 40 associations fighting poverty and exclusion across France. The following accounts from people interviewed by Mediapart are good illustrations of this.
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1. CDD stands for 'contrat à durée déterminée', a form of contract that can run for a maximum of 18 months and cannot be renewed immediately. CDI stands for 'contrat à durée indéterminée'. People employed under this contract have a high level of protection, including from dismissal.
2. The 'general regime' refers to the main unemployment register, as opposed to the special conditions that apply to cultural workers – people working on film sets or in stage shows for example - whose intermittent work status is officially recognised.
Marie, university-educated but bounced from job to job
Marie is in her 30s and has an array of university degrees – a joint honours first degree, a master's in archaeology and another in tourism. After graduating she had a series of different employment contracts. Her first job was a part-time 'contrat d'accompagnement vers l'emploi' (CAE, employment support contract) that paid a little under 900 euros a month. Lasting for six months, it was renewed once and led to a nine-month contract paid at the minimum wage, which is currently 9.61 euros an hour, or 1,457.52 euros a month for a 35-hour week. Then she was unemployed for a short time, and her unemployment benefit was calculated on the basis of what she earned in the first contract, using the principle of 'rechargeable rights'. She got 600 euros a month, which came as a huge blow. It appears this level of benefit will continue to be paid whenever she is out of work. She sees no way out.
“I've since been recruited for a full-time maternity leave replacement position in a primary school. That contract will end in July 2015. I already know that my initial rights to unemployment benefits will be used again, in other words, calculated on my first part-time CAE. This vicious circle will continue because I will go on getting insecure contracts and seeing these minimal rights repeated at the end of each contract.”
Sébastien, tied up in red tape and financial traps
Like Marie, Sébastien used to have a CAE work contract, but in 2012 he decided to set up an association to promote 3-D film animation. The business went quite well and he became a part-time employee of the association for five months. Lacking further finance, he continued on a voluntary basis. Then it got more complicated.
“I was in contact with a potential employer, a community of communes [editor's note, a tier of local government that groups together a number of local villages and/or towns], who offered me a tailor-made job to run workshops. It could have been a fabulous opportunity, except that I was again offered a CAE because of lack of funds. Pôle Emploi refused this because I had already benefited from this type of contract in 2010-2011. So Pôle Emploi preferred to pay me unemployment benefit rather than finance a subsidised contract that matched my project, and was [instead] offering me a skills assessment to 'remobilise' me. I was supposed to travel for two hours to go to group meetings that were more like ghastly group therapy than a real individual assessment.
“In the end I found a job with a CDD as a socio-cultural organiser in a social centre. I worked there for the whole of 2014. The job was relatively well paid, and in the spring of 2014 I moved with my partner and two-year-old daughter to be nearer to the job and to urban centres. In December 2014 [editor's note, once the fixed-term CDD contract ended] it was back to Pôle Emploi, except that I now benefit from rights accrued a year earlier [editor's note, i.e. from his previous, less well-paid job], that is, 490 euros a month for 10 months! The situation is worse than before because our rent and bills have increased. My partner has gone back to university and also claims unemployment benefit.”
Annabel, a long haul to nowhere
After a series of various minor jobs Annabel decided 10 years ago to go into professional and vocational development. For seven years she went from one fixed-term contract to another, then took a two-year master's in designing training courses to try and give her CV greater value on the jobs market, so she could stop doing jobs that simply bridged a gap. But with her boyfriend Jules earning the minimum wage, plus two children, things have not got any easier for 44-year-old Annabel.
“For example, in the first half of 2014 I worked for three associations at the same time, which meant three organisations, three jobs, three email addresses, three passwords... Then I went part-time and now I am back on unemployment benefit. In 11 years I have worked for 11 different companies and each time I have had good feedback on my professionalism, but my salary is less than at the beginning of my career. So now I am still just a short-term worker, and I will soon be a vulnerable short-term worker because at 45 you start to be worth nothing, it seems.
“I have never paid income tax in my life (1). I no longer have any self-confidence and the roughly 30 interviews I've gone to have undermined me. Looking for work is hell for me – saying the same things over and over, answering questions while making it seem I am happy to be there. I am worried for my children – we are no longer fighting feudalism, we are institutionalising it. The new watchword is contacts. If you're the son of a manager, that's possible, but in a poor area with parents who are unemployed or in insecure jobs, it's a joke!”
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1. Roughly half of French households do not pay income tax.
Margareth, out of work for the first time at 46
Margareth came to France from Cameroon in 2009 and lives with her son in a block of flats in Orly, south of Paris. She has always worked, but in temporary jobs, in sales or cleaning. Last year, the fact that she is classified as a handicapped worker – something she admits to with difficulty – gave her access to a year's training to qualify in hygiene. But the promised diploma and permanent job never materialised, neither for Margareth nor for the 20 or so other people who followed the course.
“I'm 46 and I've always found work easily, sometimes temping, sometimes with a CDD. I earn around the SMIC [minimum wage] but now I've been unemployed for three months and I only got 420 euros in February. I have a 17-year-old child, I am bringing him up on my own. What will become of me? I'm willing to work anywhere in the Paris region, and there are job vacancies, but I haven’t been selected. I'm constantly being asked for the diploma I got but have never received. I don't know who to turn to.”
Lisa’s master's degrees lead to disappointment, not employment
Lisa is a specialist in the conservation of archives with two master's degrees, but she is finding it hard to get short-term jobs, let alone permanent jobs. She has had one fixed-term CDD contract after another for the past three years after leaving university and has been registered with Pôle Emploi since 2012. Her account of her life is tinged with black humour.
“Last year, thanks to my few contacts, I managed to get two CDDs of five months each, it's crazy, what can I say, my golden age! In two years I've been in eight different companies, not bad eh? I would love to jump from one CDD to another and discover a thousand different workplaces if I could predict the future and be sure of finding work at the end of a contract. But my life is all about running after contracts, doubt, insecurity and the impossibility of making long-term plans.
“It's exhausting psychologically speaking, and hard on the wallet. I feel as if I constantly have my head in paperwork, sending a copy of a new contract to the CAF [editor's note, the Family Allowance agency], to Pôle Emploi or to the Social Security. It is also difficult for those close to me. My parents, who only worked for one company in 40 years and had just one work contract, call me and ask for news, and I'm there at the other end of the line with nothing to say.”
Valérie, too old to be hired at 50
Valérie, a singer, has always moved from one short-term job to another “like a galley slave”. Now, at 50, she has decided to jump ship. “I'm not looking [for work] any more, what's the point?” she asks. She worked in Nantes in west France for 12 years as an intermittent cultural worker. When she returned to Paris she resumed her initial line of work as a temporary secretary and hostess. But the jobs gradually became few and far between, “too old for the clubs, not thin enough probably”, she says. Her last job was two years ago as a replacement in crèches at Puteaux to the west of Paris for three months. But she never got paid, and has been fighting ever since to win her case. At the same time she continues to perform as a singer in bars, collecting money in a hat – on the black, inevitably – for around 30 euros a night.
“Once I’ve paid the rent I've got 22 euros left to live on. For the past five years I've stopped heating my flat, I eat one meal out of every two and I filter my coffee twice. Sometimes I fast for four or five days, but not for the fun of it. My parents help me from time to time, that's what gets me through.”
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- The French version of this story can be found here.
English version by Sue Landau
Editing by Michael Streeter