In the context of a crisis whose output does not appear on the horizon, with austerity and
austerity as the only perspective, the question of the mass of insecurity. Consider how
precarious and most importantly, how to fight against it? ---- Insecurity: a status
elusive ---- First, we must distinguish the precariousness of poverty and its most extreme
manifestations. A common stereotype is to reduce the uncertainty in its most ultimate and
most visible, such as the portion of the population living in the street. For us, on the
contrary, the concept of precariousness covers a much wider reality, and in a sense,
invisible. ---- What is poverty? ---- It can be defined as a socio-economic position where
access to resources (allowances, wages, income, housing, energy, ...) is uncertain in
time, that is to say, subject to interruption at any time.
This access is subject to the arbitrary authority, either administrative (P?le Emploi, Caf
...), or hierarchical (public or private employers). This uncertainty strike throughout
the life of those who suffer: deteriorating relationships with friends and family, forced
mobility, deterioration of living standards, no possibility of life project in the medium
and long term ...
This definition applies of course to the condition of wage-e. But we are interested
parties who suffer the wage level of uncertainty is higher.
Place in the labor market
Schematically, the labor market is divided into two sets or tight or really homogeneous.
The first market is characterized by job security (CDI, civil servant or equivalent),
stable wages and often higher than the median, it allows easy access to consumer goods,
credit, leasing and real estate.
The second is an adjustment variable and include workers not benefiting from a stable
position. It includes the precarious and unemployed. It induces a lack of access to
resources and less integration work group. It includes a wide range of articles: training,
CDD, unemployment, temporary, part-time work underground, certain types of CDI (employment
blackmail: site closure) assisted contract, intermittently, alternating work or learning
self-business ...
Insecurity is characterized by the rapid passage of one of these statutes to the other, or
their combination (eg the beneficiary be "RSA activity" and work part-time CDD). It is
precarious, rather than belonging to one or the other of these categories, which becomes
the long-term economic status.
How many are there in precarious?
To give you an idea, it has a population of 26,241,000 active workers in 2011, according
to INSEE. In which there are: 4.8 million unemployed in December 2011. stagiaires1
750,000 in 2011 [ 1 ]. 2 million beneficiaries of RSA2. 665,000 scholarship students in
2011 [ 2 ]. 2.9 million temporary workers in 2011: 400,000 temporary workers, apprentices
and 350,000 2,100,000 CSD
These figures, which are available, do not take into account the black, which represent 4%
of GDP or 60 billion euros (INSEE 2010).
No more than the mass-employee are in permanent full-time workers in small businesses
subcontracting. Officially, the status would protect insecurity. Unless they are on shaky
ground at the option of relocation and abrupt changes of suppliers of large companies
donating orders. The only industrial subcontracting (to which should be added a set of
utilities) employed about 350,000 people in 2007.
The addition of different figures obtained for a total of 11.45 million precarious. That
said, given that different laws may be cumulative and the holders of the RSA and students
are not recorded, are in the labor force, it is difficult to quantify precisely the number
of precarious. However, we can estimate that about 30 to 40% of the workforce has a
precarious status. This represents a low range of 7.8 million people and a high range of
9.4 million people.
In addition, this precarious population defined as active, adds the precarious retirees.
No assets and low income (minimum age pensions or small), it is difficult to quantify
population suffers from the same kinds of difficulties in their lives (housing, health,
food) that many precarious assets.
Casualization is the result of a capitalist policy that allows to weaken much of the wage
and split it into multiple statutes, making the collective struggles harder.
What are the prospects of organization and collective action?
Balance struggles of precarious
In the 2000s, there has been a change: while unemployed movements stagnated or regressed,
they emerged with them various hybrid collective fight against precariousness.
Contemporary movements of unemployed appear on the public scene in 1994 with the first
Marches against unemployment. The main components are APEIS the MNCP, the CGT Unemployed
and action against unemployment! (AC!).
Cycle control in 1997 and 1998 saw the movements of the unemployed move from simply claim
the return to full employment than the guaranteed income without necessarily linking the work.
The early 2000s saw an expansion of the issue of unemployment than insecurity, which then
develops very rapidement4. In Paris, the struggle of the Opera Pizza Hut, and especially
the McDonald Boulevard Saint-Germain (115-day strike in 2000-2001) are emblematic of this
mutation.
In 2003, intermittent fighting against reform of their status brings additional visibility
to the struggles against precarity and are closely followed by students whose precarious
generation will be the figurehead media.
The movement of the 2006 struggle against the CPE and the law on equal opportunities will
definitively the question of insecurity in the center of the debate.
Therefore, major initiatives were unemployed, precarious mainly found in the New Right
group, which was mainly organized marches against regional unemployment. It should be
noted that during this period the movements of precarious and unemployed extend their
claims to the refusal of extended control precarious compensated (CAF, P?le Emploi).
Evelyne Perrin for analyzing these developments, it is a "profound renewal of the
unemployed movement that we are witnessing gradually, with a distancing of the job at any
price, no one side with respect to claims brought classical in vain for years by the
movement in favor of actions and modes of intervention giving a "hold" on the situation
v?cue.5 " Since the 1990s we experienced the passage of a long-term unemployment to a
massive reduction accompanied by a widespread casualization of the workforce, leading to
the situation described in the first part. These changes explain the extension of the
movement of the unemployed movement of precarious as expanding the claims.
It is essential that the different elements of the movement of the unemployed and
precarious come to work together, without denying the specificities of each, allowing a
balance of power favorable to precarious.
The specificity of precarious workers
Which first characterizes the situation is precarious integration more difficult (which is
not to say impossible) to collective work.
The work group is a "group [which] brings together individuals belonging to a community of
interest, adopting rules for working together and implementing regulations collective
activity," he can "share and build strategies defensive against what ails at work6 " .
Most of the time the temporary employment reduces the possibility of appropriation of the
workplace and is an obstacle to integration into the labor collective.
Unionization of precarious place of the work is difficult, for several reasons: On the one
hand, the feeling of being that way does not encourage them to organize. The other, their
temporary presence discourages unions seek to recruit.
In addition, the precarious situation makes it even more vulnerable to discrimination
because of union pressure from employers (harassment, non-renewal, blackmail). Just do not
renew a contract for the person disappears from the workplace.
What solutions to this situation?
The organization of precarious
We can distinguish two types of precarious employment. The first relates to employee-es-es
of this work on a regular basis and over time, but with a precarious status. Such workers
are generally well integrated into the work group. Colleagues often ignore their
difference in status. In such situations, the perspective is the acquisition of a stable
status within the company, so it is logical that the precarious are organized in the union
section of the workplace
The second type involves workers alternating short periods of unemployment and labor,
which change very frequently employer, without any real integration to a collective work.
In this case, it is necessary that the precarious are organized on the basis of the
situation, that is to say to precarity relevant territorial level (district, commune,
department).
The organization should then be related to the precarious situation as defined above and
not to a mutant status often. There's more sense to organize as precarious as that
unemployed and at the end of rights as RSAste, then as seasonal CDD and rebelote as
unemployed.
This type of organization wide has several advantages. The first is to organize themselves
in time in case of change of work or individual status. The second is to fight against all
aspects of insecurity and not just those related to work: access to social services,
housing, health care, and more generally everything related to living conditions (energy,
housing, food).
What concrete forms of precarious take this organization?
There are two types of structures in which the precarious organize, and both have their
legitimacy ad hoc union branches (as in the CGT Unemployed) or group / associations
sometimes purely local, sometimes integrated networks (AC!) or movements (MNCP, APEIS).
We can make three medium-term assumptions for organizing precarious integration of a
specific organization in precarious union structures. For example, the section of
Montpellier MNCP is integrated Solidarity H?rault, which recognizes the need for specific
organization precarious. Or, imagine the establishment of a common union Precarious within
the CGT, the conjunction of certain sectors of the CGT-Interim, CGT-show and the
CGT-Unemployed. Enlargement organizations " traditional "unemployed, that is to say, AC,
APEIS the MNCP CGT unemployed and all the problems of insecurity and an organization based
on the precarious status rather than unemployed process which seems already well advanced.
coordination or a federation, the national existing local collectives (LCP Montpellier,
assembly against casualization in Marseille, Exploited / pissed in Ales, CIP-IDF, AG
Crisis Nancy, Stop precariousness in Paris, the network-Stop insecurity, cockroaches
Montreuil, MCPL in Rennes, Lille Collective precarious ...). This type of group has the
advantage of allowing the integration into the struggles of precarious that are no longer
on the labor market by highlighting the struggles associated with living conditions.
In our view, this is not so much the form of the organization of precarious to be decisive
as its content and practices, that is to say, the struggle with the workers so insecure
non-joint terms of work, social benefits (Caf, P?le Emploi), and conditions related to
poor living (housing, energy, food).
Libertarian Alternative to the preferred orientations will vary depending on the local
context, the aim being first to bring these areas of struggle within existing organizations.
At first, the goal is to first build the base, these control structures to facilitate the
emergence of solidarity practices face increasing difficulties that people will meet in
the very near future, with the deepening of the crisis and austerity.
Ideally unite all these forces into a structure representing the interests of national
precarious. But to unite, we need a mobile, that is to say, control axes and unifying claims.
Which axes of struggle?
If the result is much precarious economic conditions, it is not only considered within the
world of work but more broadly. Fight against precariousness is to fight for better
working conditions, a stable status in its entreprisse for those who want it, but not
only. As noted above, insecurity manifests itself as social providers face as CFOs or
Poles job and in everyday life (access to housing, energy). Fight against precariousness
is generally against all these aspects. Our logic control is to try to remedy the
segmentation between these different struggles.
The organization on the basis of the situation of precarious identifies three axes
struggles to juggle are, without hierarchy: Defense working conditions with employers
(private or public) struggle for wages for security employment, and more generally for
compliance with labor legislation, incorporating cases of moonlighting defense access to
social benefits: fight against radiation, against the policing, against forced labor
(workfare) , for the increase and extension of rights. This should not prevent him from
denouncing the deplorable working conditions of social workers (P?le Emploi harassment
advisor or agent FCA), and as far as possible, to work with them. Struggle for the
improvement of living conditions associated with precarious status: against energy
poverty, for example it will restore power or gas against difficulties in paying proper
nutrition it will be self-requisitions for housing, shares of pressure on the donor or the
requisition of empty homes .... struggle for resorption of precariousness: For the
movement of precarious can set one goal for an "improvement" of precariat. It also needs
to endorse the general demands of the fight against unemployment and precarious: reduction
of working time to 32 hours / week with hiring corresponding collective tenure, veto-es on
employee layoffs, etc.. The movement of precarious and will argue that it is an integral
part of the social movement and walking with the incumbents in the class struggle.
[ 1 ] Source: Actuchomage.org
[ 2 ] Students, Statistical references, 2011.
Posted January 30, 2013 by commission congress
Home »
» (en) France, Alternative Libertair AL 11th Congress - What organization for precarious? (fr)