Logistics, suppliers, subcontractors … The many hidden jobs in the industry

“At the beginning, we had everything done externally”, recalls Jennifer Maumont. When she had the idea of ​​founding in 2016, with her companion, a brand of “slow fashion” accessories, the co-founder of Jules & Jenn quickly found herself confronted with this problem: she did not have a production workshop for her. make its models.

With her years of experience as marketing director at Christian Dior, the entrepreneur turns to the solution widely deployed in the fashion industry: delegating manufacturing to subcontracting workshops. “From the start, we wanted to work with partners for all the production part, but also the logistics for sending and receiving products, until the design of our site”, remembers the designer.

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Today, the brand has internalized some of its activities and plans to set up its own manufacture. But the fashion company continues to delegate: Jules & Jenn is at the origin of 56 full-time equivalents with its partners, of which almost 90% related to the production of models, against 6 own jobs.

Outsourcing in services

The example of Jules & Jenn illustrates it, the industry indirectly supports millions of employees and intermediaries co-dependent on each other: logistics, R & D, suppliers, subcontractors … If deindustrialisation is a reality in France, the statistical drop in industrial employment hides a much more complex reality. “Economists’ estimates estimate between 0.6 and 1.2 the number of indirect jobs for 1 direct job created in industry”, indicates Vincent Charlet, general delegate of the think tank La Fabrique de l’Industrie.

At Coca-Cola France, for a direct job created, twelve indirect jobs would result upstream and downstream of the value chain, according to a study by the Xerfi Institute carried out in 2018 for the beverage brand. The statistics put forward by industry are sometimes subject to wide debate. One thing is certain: “The outsourcing of industrial jobs, particularly in the tertiary sector, is one of the reasons for the phenomenon of deindustrialization”, argues Vincent Charlet.

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When, for example, Renault entrusts Sodexo with the catering activity of its employees, the jobs do not disappear: they are “moved” to this subcontractor. “Between 1980 and 2007, a quarter of industrial job losses can be explained by outsourcing in the service sector”, adds Vincent Charlet. While industrial employment, strictly speaking, has plummeted in France, from 5.5 million in 1970 to just over 3 million direct jobs today (excluding construction), tertiary jobs have exploded, passing from 5.3 million to 12.6 million in the commercial sector over the same period.

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