Forty-three percent: this is the share of establishments for which the branch collective agreement (CCB) is the priority or very frequent reference for negotiating on all issues in the company, in particular to increase salaries. This is therefore less than one establishment in two.
However, for public policies to be effective, branch negotiations are supposed to play a key role in defining working conditions for employees of all companies within the same sector of activity. Historically, the first conventions posed “a common framework for employment conditions (mobility rules, remuneration, corporate social protection, etc.) and work conditions (work organization, working hours and pace, etc.)”, recall the three economists Noélie Delahaie, Anne Fretel and Héloïse Petit. But the use that companies make of it today varies greatly. And if 98% of employees are covered by a CCB, employers’ reference to the sector is not systematic when negotiating working conditions.
This is what the researchers analyze in a joint text written for the scientific mediation project “What do we know about work? »from the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for the Evaluation of Public Policies (Liepp), distributed in collaboration with the Liepp and the Presses de Sciences Po on the Employment channel of the Lemonde.fr site.
Based on statistics from the 2017 “Professional Relations and Company Negotiations” survey by the Ministry of Labor and their field surveys carried out from 2018 to 2020, the three economists demonstrate why and to what extent industry conventions influence ( or not) employment conditions, working conditions and wages.
They have thus constructed a typology which distinguishes four categories of branches, according to the role given to branch conventions by companies: the first two bring together branches where employers mainly refer to the convention to negotiate, whatever the theme and those where companies often refer to it.
These two categories represent 43% of establishments. This mainly concerns the health and social sector for the first profile, where the CCBs play their role as a “safety net” in a context where salaries are likely to be caught up by the minimum wage; and for the second, the hotel-restaurant-tourism, retail and wholesale trade sectors, mainly food where the CCBs limit social dumping.
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