Office notebook. “Chronopost, Accor, Carrefour, GM&S, we are experiencing the same things. So that’s what we have to tackle.”launches Vincent Labrousse, speaking of the damage of subcontracting on working conditions, on employment and, ultimately, on economic activity. “ At La Souterraine, buyout after buyout organized the destructuring of the company within its know-how. » The former CGT delegate of the subcontractor company for automotive suppliers GM&S La Souterraine spoke in the Senate on Friday, October 21 in front of an audience of employees, trade unionists, deputies, gathered to discuss what makes ” system “ in subcontracting and on ways to advance the protection of employees.
In the Salle Médicis of the Palais du Luxembourg, poignant testimonies followed one another, on the podium and in the assembly, from employees in the air transport, distribution, cleaning, etc., talking about “employees who are afraid”, “treated like robots”, without respecting their rest times or providing them with protective equipment. Perceiving wages lower than those practiced for the same profession at the originator. Threatened with immediate end of mission at the slightest protest.
Whatever the sector of activity, their future depends on the renewal of the commercial contract with the customer. “Subcontracting is a system that allows this kind of drift, since it replaces the employment contract with a commercial contract, in a triangular relationship that puts the worker in the middle. The client can thus not worry about the working conditions of the subcontractor’s employeeexplains Clément Ruffier, project manager at the National Agency for the Improvement of Working Conditions. In the nuclear industry, for example, 80% of the radiation risk is borne by subcontracted workers. »
Review the relationship between principal and subcontractor
Moreover, they often have no interlocutor to turn to: employees, or even – worse – self-employed contractor, subcontractor of subcontractor, nobody knows them at the client’s. This “perverse and dangerous system” generates “new forms of vulnerability through the invisibility of the individual with regard to his organization, deplores Pascal Savoldelli, communist senator from Val-de-Marne. Companies have thus transformed permanent contracts into more and more precarious jobs in smaller and smaller boxes”.
The challenge is in the numbers: “in 2017, 88.3% of establishments with eleven or more employees were involved in the subcontracting chain as principals, contractors or both”, recalled the economist Julie Valentin. Currently it is the principal who puts the work in, who controls the work, but without long-term responsibility. “As regards occupational risks, in contractor companies, there is more arduous and dangerous work, but no more means of prevention. We must think about the work community from a notion of a fragmented company”suggests Nadine Thévenot, researcher at the Center for Economics at the Sorbonne.
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