Changing region, a dream that not everyone can afford

For almost three years, teleworkers have fascinated researchers and the media. Families newly settled in a house with a garden and a swing arouse moving reports. The merits of weekly round trips by TGV and daily motorized journeys are judged in terms of their impact on the planet. The productivity of teleworkers, the decoration of their office, their diet (based on snacks and chocolate) are the subject of serious studies. Do ex-citizens support the disappearance of anonymity? Can they pay the electricity bill or the oil tank? So many questions to which only partial answers are given, in the absence of demographic data.

Read also: The “Rush to the West”, or the Unthought of Demographic Change

Non-teleworkers are not even entitled to questions. Their posted employment, attached to a place or to other people, cannot be practiced in the living room or the bedroom. They are waiters, sellers, health or cleaning professionals, forklift drivers, and they too could dream of leaving their home which is too small to lead a bucolic existence.

Non-teleworking represents 70% of jobs – 80%, even, outside major cities

Non-teleworking accounts for 70% of jobs – 80%, even, outside large cities. But the aspirations in terms of the living environment of non-teleworkers are absent from surveys and reports. “There are a lot of telework experts and very few non-telework experts”smiles the journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely, author, with Jérôme Fourquet, of France before our eyes (Threshold, 2021). We cannot exclude a matrix bias: experts, sociologists, economists and other journalists, who can themselves work wherever they want, tend to think of telework as a universal solution.

Local solidarity

Therefore, to probe this forgotten continent that is the development of the territory seen by those who work in post, we must be content with snippets. Sociologist Yaëlle Amsellem-Mainguy, author of local girls (Presses de Sciences Po, 2021), describes “young women from the working classes, in rural areas, whose jobs are shift work or involve caring for others, children or the elderly”. occupying “non-telecommuting jobs”these people have set up, in their immediate geographical environment, “a form of solidarity based on their family and those around them, which facilitates the management of daily life, troubleshooting for shopping or childcare. These links are all the more important when the economic capital is weak.. Therefore, the “local girls”and the guys as well, “do not have the means to change their place of residence. It would complicate things, it would be taking a lot of risks.explains the sociologist.

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