“Work is the government’s first fight”, declared Gabriel Attal, at the opening of the government seminar organized on March 27, in the martial tone that we now know. A seminar which followed the announcements made during its general policy declaration, which included the reform of the active solidarity income and the abolition of the specific solidarity allowance – two measures with a very hypothetical effect on work – , as well as the experimentation of the four-day week in the administrations of the ministries. To these measures, confirmed but not detailed during the seminar, was added a new unemployment insurance reform project, intended to “encourage return to employment”. If “working better” could have surreptitiously appeared as a goal of the executive, it is ultimately “working more” which appears to be the government’s watchword.
Ultimately, the formula chosen by the executive does not matter. In either case, these expressions only mask a staggering incomprehension of what is currently happening at work, and consequently an incapacity to pursue a work policy (“work” yes, and not only “employment”) worthy of the name.
Because recent changes in work require political supervision. Over the past decades, the working conditions of French men and women have been transformed drastically, under the effect of technological and managerial developments which essentially result in the dematerialization of work (remote working, algorithmic management) and through the outsourcing of non-directly productive tasks (cleaning and maintenance of infrastructure, in particular). These transformations have led to the appearance of new working methods, including: teleworking, platform work (that of VTC drivers or meal delivery people), or even the subcontracting of care work ( that of things as well as of living things).
Semantic ambiguity
Does Mr. Attal sincerely believe that he is politically supporting these transformations by declaring that, “from now on, in the State, maintenance staff who wish can work the same hours as everyone else” ? Does the executive believe it has sufficiently supervised the emergence of teleworking, which raises, beyond the material and organizational questions linked to its operational implementation, political questions linked in particular to social, generational and gender inequalities? And did the French government believe it was illustrating its concern for “work better” by blocking, on March 11, the European directive which aimed to reclassify the jobs of VTC drivers and parcel or meal delivery people, today wrongly described as “independent” by the platforms that employ them ?
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