Nadine Thèvenot^[1]

How do working conditions and employment conditions fit together? Does employment status still constitute a guarantee of protection for workers? To what extent have changes in company management methods, financial restructuring, or the breakdown of work organisations contributed to transforming the sources of hardship and psychosocial risks at work? The contributions in this part of the book open up new avenues for analysing the relationship with work and the sources of precariousness and vulnerability. The authors —sociologists and socio-economists— have studied the real conditions of work to reveal the ambivalent nature of the ‘traditional’ determinants of employment and working conditions and their relationship.

The workers’ descriptions and profiles presented here assess the nature of the impact of employment situation on the boundary between work and non-work. Combined with economic subordination, the status of independent or freelance worker forces into ‘taking whatever may come’. The situation is not the only element that conditions the porosity of the border. The subordination and economic precariousness of ‘on the clock’ cleaning workers or technicians leads them to accept staggered and flexible hours and to be ‘on call’. But off-work life is also a source of supplementary income and of collectives that are useful for building up resistance and enabling workers to continue their activity despite its precariousness and sometimes its danger.

One issue that runs through all of these contributions is that of the breakdown of work collectives. It takes various forms: the subcontracting of chambermaids or security guards, the multiplicity of work situations involved in the production of a show, or the permanent reorganisation of work suffered by employees on a global scale. The life stories of workers in the performing arts, chambermaids or security guards, or the analysis of the link between organisational changes and the loss of meaning in work proposed in this section, raise the question of the ‘problem for work’ and its conditions, as posed by the breakdown of collectives. What are the effects in terms of isolation, invisibilisation, double subordination, intensification, and loss of meaning? What are the consequences for living conditions?

Robin Casse is interested in the differentiated employment and working conditions in the technical professions of the performing arts in French-speaking Switzerland. Several criteria for analysing the arduousness of working conditions are adopted, leading to the opposition of two professional spaces according to the place given to the artistic recognition of their work: the ‘technical artists’ alongside the ‘shadow workers’. What criteria should be used to analyse and compare their working and employment conditions? Based on a comparative analysis of the actual working conditions of so-called ‘freelance’ professions, such as technical creators and company managers, and professions exercised as permanent employments, such as theatrical stage managers and technical designers, the author invites us to reflect on the different ways of work engagement that contribute to the construction of working and employment conditions.

Saphia Doumenc adopts a gender approach to the working conditions and dominance relations of female cleaning workers. The breakdown of the work collective is manifested here by the massive recourse to subcontracting on the part of hotel principals and the isolation of the employees who are placed at their disposal. The precariousness suffered by women in the household is part of the double subordination to which they are forced, the most tangible manifestations of which are the particularly frequent occupational illnesses and accidents that affect them. What resources do these employees find to continue working? Based on participant observation and a field survey, the author compares three life stories that shed light on the role of resources outside of work or on the edge of work.

Laurence Lizé’s work also focuses on working conditions in subcontracting. The sectors studied are cleaning and security. The harshness of working conditions is apprehended on the basis of the different forms of work flexibility mobilised by the employers in their recourse to subcontracting. To what extent do labour management strategies and social policies conducted by the public authorities fuel these degraded employment segments? The qualitative survey conducted with a dozen workers leads the author to draw up portraits of ‘docile’ employees who are not only part of the traditional forms of quantitative labour flexibility, but who also question the nature of the transformation of the labour market’s secondary segment.

Thomas Coutrot and Coralie Perez propose a conceptual and ‘metric’ analysis of the meaning of work, the loss of which is seen as an emerging psychosocial risk factor. What are the constituent dimensions of the meaning of work? Based on a multidisciplinary review of the specialised literature, the proposed approach is based, on the one hand, on the critical theory of living work to retain the three constituent dimensions of the meaning of work and, on the other hand, on the Working Conditions survey to construct empirical measurement indicators for each of these dimensions: the feeling of social usefulness, development capacity, and ethical coherence. The descriptive analysis carried out on the basis of the 2013 survey data invites reflection about the determinants of the meaning attributed to work by employees and their critical experience of the purpose and impact of their work on themselves and the world in general.

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