[Les formes d’emploi flexibles et le temps partiel ne concernent plus seulement les ménages pauvres en majorité. Pierre Courtioux est professeur à Paris School of Business (PSB) et chercheur associé au Centre d’économie de la Sorbonne (CES). Il a principalement travaillé sur des questions d’emploi, d’éducation et de protection sociale, notamment en utilisant et en développant des modèles de microsimulation. Ses recherches récentes portent aussi sur les stratégies de recherche et développement (R&D) des entreprises. Il a effectué des travaux d’expertise pour diverses institutions françaises – France Stratégie, Direction générale du Trésor, Conseil d’orientation des retraites (COR), Conseil d’analyse économique (CAE), Observatoire national de la pauvreté et de l’exclusion sociale (Onpes) – et internationales – Bureau international du travail (BIT), Commission européenne, Centre européen pour le développement de la formation professionnelle (Cedefop).]
Since the American debate of the 1980s on the shrinking of the middle classes (“ shrinking middle class »), sociologists, economists and political scientists (for example Louis Chauvel, 2006 ; Dominique Goux and Eric Maurin, 2012 ; Martial Foucault, 2017) regularly examine this category of population, both to analyze its diversity and to understand the evolution of their political choices (Thomas Kurer and Bruno Landing, 2019).
In this perspective, the financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences on the resilience of the middle classes have been the subject of international comparative studies which have shown the heterogeneity of the dynamics at work depending on the country and according to the reforms of the labor market. and social protection committed (Daniel Vaughan-Whithehead, 2016 ; OECD, 2019).
In this context, the French situation appears paradoxical. Indeed, even though in comparison with other countries the French middle classes seem to have resisted crises and economic transformations particularly well, several recent social movements testify to a diffuse malaise for a large part of the population, which crystallizes on the occasion of tax reforms (the “yellow vests” in 2018) and social (the social movement against the pension reform in 2023).
As new labor market reforms are on the horizon, we believe it is important to review what the labor market is doing to the middle classes, based on work carried out as part of an international project coordinated by the Office International Labor Organization (ILO) (Daniel Vaughan-Whithehead, 2016 ; Pierre Courtioux and Christine Erhel, 2016 ; Pierre Courtioux et al., 2017, 2020). This work shows that this maintenance of a relatively large middle class has been accompanied by pressure on the less well-off, concerning access to employment or the forms of employment occupied.
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