CommandsSummary :
- Editorial. On the need to strike a balance between flexibility & precariousness
- Precariousness, territories and societal times
- Flexibility constraints and new productive organisations
- Flexibility: a multi-facetted phenomenon
- New forms of work organisation: the end of Taylorian model?
- Economic changes and employment statutes in Ile-de-France
- Under-employment in the Ile-de-France area
- Flexible employment and the city’s new relationship with work
- Regional job markets and ageing of the working population by 2020
- Precariousness: transitions or marginalisation?
- Professional precariousness: Unstable jobs and unsatisfactory work
- Managing insecurity, paths and personal projects: lessons from a research programme
- Young people: insecure forms of employment and routes into the job market
- Employment trends on the greater Paris area job market during the 1990s
- First-qualification job seeker integration: Transfer association’s experience
- Poverty, employment and social security
- Cohesive management of working hours and other societal times
Supported by growth, temporary employment is the third job-creating sector in the Ile-de-France region.- Photo : © Lacombe (Matthias), IAU îdF
The bond linking the economic development of the territory and the rise of precariousness follows various contradictory routes.- Photo : © Lacombe (Matthias), IAU îdF
Women, highly present in the labour, are in the heart of the claims for the adaptation of working time.- Photo : © Lacombe (Matthias), IAU îdF
The improvement of transport, accommodation and the collective services facilitates the access to employment, in particular for female labour…- Photo : © Degremont (Cécile) IAU îdF
Flexibility and precariousness. Cahiers n° 131-132
March 2002
While enhancing its competitiveness the Ile-de-France region economy has also become more fragile and vulnerable to fluctuations in international economic trends
Over the last thirty years the Ile-de-France region economy has undergone far-reaching change. While enhancing its competitiveness in line with other great European metropolises and adapting to the demands of globalisation, it has also become more fragile and vulnerable to fluctuations in international economic trends.
Companies have turned to varied forms of flexibility in order to cope with an increasingly unstable and uncertain economic environment. Subcontracting, relocation, new hybrid forms of employment, hiring or firing, wage policies have had a range of consequences on local workforces and local economies. A growing number of people are now affected in terms of income, welfare, working lives and their lives in general.
The situation has brought both constraints and opportunities. Changing employment and working patterns have coincided with societal change: individualisation of working, leisure and consumption practices, changes in family structures, rise in women entering the workplace, an emphasis on free time and independence.
The issue of economic, social, spatial & time regulation is of key importance
In a region where economic centres of excellence can be found cheek by jowl with deprived districts, subject to stark contrasts between wealth and poverty, the stake is of key importance and the issue of economic, social, spatial and time regulation paramount.
The demand for “flexibility” will require adaptation on both and individual and sub-regional level if “precariousness” is to be avoided. Meeting this challenge requires an innovative approach and it is local government’s role to devise initiatives such as the recent “time agencies” in order to do so. This issue of the Cahiers addresses a variety of topics from a range of viewpoints and looks to the future by forecasting changes on a regional and local level.
Contact
Benchmarks
Ile-de-France region key data in 1999
- Population: 10,952,000 inhabitants i.e. 18% of the French population
- The surplus of births over deaths : +87,200 per year
- Migration exchanges with the outside : -54,900 per year
- 5,137,000 jobs i.e. 22% of the total employment figure in France
- In 2000, Ile-de-France’s GDP : €2,592 billion i.e. 28% of the French GDP
- GDP per capita: €35,977 per year
- 3,850,000 people are employed in the tertiary sector (i.e. 82% of the Ile-de-France jobs)
- 94% of all jobs in Ile-de-France region are salaried jobs
- The industry employs approximately 630,000 people, and includes strong added value sectors such as the electric-electronic industry, aeronautic industry, chemistry pharmaceutical industry, or the printing-media-publishing industry.
- Executive & higher intellectual positions account for 25% of the active working population
- The construction industry employs 230,000 people
- The unemployment rate: 7.7%. The number of job-seekers (July 2001): 401,000
- There are two categories of low-income workers : people who are paid low salaries, and poor workers.
- A low salary threshold has been set at €838.47
- A very low salary threshold has been set at €628.85
- In 2001, the poverty line is €579.31 in France (the poverty line used by European statistics is at €640.29)
- 3.4 million employees are in the low salary category (i.e. 1 employee out of 6)
- The proportion of the least paid employees increased strongly between 1983 and 1998, going from 5% to 10.6%
- Foreigners accounted for over 40% of all job losses in the construction industry between 1975 and 1990.
- Retired people who account for poor households are 18% in 1996 (versus 56% in 1978)
- Large families are over-represented: 35% of such households have at least three children. Their rent after housing benefit accounts for 40% of income of their resources. Generally speaking, spouses do not work and nine times out of ten such households manage on one salary.
- 670,000 children come from poor families i.e. 1 child out of 5 in 1996 (25% of them live with a single parent and 50% of them have foreign parents)