547
Mobilizations Among the « Grey Zones » of Wage-Earning Status and Self-Employment. Power Struggles in the Worlds of Work.
Language: Spanish, French and English
Among the « grey zones » of employment, the elements inherent in wage-earning status and self-employment have been called into question, generating non-standard forms of labour and employment. This session focuses on situations involved by the blurry outlines of salaried situations and self-employment : “false self-employed” workers, i.e. dependent self employed who are actually a kind of employee, and "false wage-earners", i.e solo self-employed who get a pay slip through cooperative – cooperative or umbrella companies. The aim of the communications is to shed light on the political dimension and power struggles of such situations : transformation of the autonomy at work, exclusion from social protection systems, struggles with the employer or ordering costumer, competition with other workers, fluctuations of the authority within the work community, disintegration or reinforcement of solidarity networks, etc.
The communications may stress the following points :
- The political claims and goals of workers, in terms of rights, new frames of employment, symbolic acknowledgment, transformations of industrial relations and collective bargaining…
- The forms of collective action : shaping of new groups of workers, resorting to “violent” actions or to law, emergence of coalitions with existing social movements, use of new technologies.
- The consequences on professional contents : how do workers may then auto-determine the contents and frontiers of their activity, in other words, control its professionalization ?
Through qualitative or quantitative research methods, the communications will show how these power struggles occur among various arenas and places of/around the worlds of work.