Assessing the Quality of Employment in France: Focus on Dimensions 3 and 4

1. The Quality of Employment in France(with focus on dimensions 3 and 4)

2. Plan • Relevance of the indicators proposed by the TF to measure the QE in France • General assessment of the QE in France • Scope on dimension 3 : Working hours and balancing work and non-working life • Scope on dimension 4 : Security of employment and social protection

3. Relevance of indicators proposed by the Task Force

4. General assessment on the Quality of Employment in France (1) • Widely held opinion: at the opposite of US, in France quality privileged at the expense of quantity (cf. Krugman : « Europe jobless, America penniless? ») • Actually, relatively good results concerning Income and benefits from employment as well as, in general, Safety at work, Working hours, Security of employment and social protection, Social dialogue and Skills development • But that concerns essentially the « insiders »

5. General assessment on the Quality of Employment in France (2) • For the others, the « outsiders », the Quality of Employment is much lower : hazardous conditions of work, unfair treatment in employment, low pay and bad social security cover, irregular working hours and/or underemployment, precarious status, weak cover by collective bargaining, limited access to life-long learning, no recognition of work… • Many of these characteristics have been recently developing, particularly among unskilled workers

6. Working time and balancing work and non-working life : working hours (1) • Average annual (actual) hours worked per person : need to distinguish employees and self-employed on the one hand, full-time and part-time workers on the other hand • Averages very difficult to interpret : 1680 h, is it too long or too short? • Need to introduce subjective elements referring to the wishes of those concerned • Need to supplement this information by dispersion indicators

7. Working time and balancing work and non-working life : working hours (2) • 10% of full-time employees >= 48 h per week, 29% among « managers » • On the other hand, 13.5% of employees < 30 h per week, of which 30% would wish to work more • But for international comparison, it’s better to use indicators of underemployment : 6% / all employees; 31% / part-time employees

8. Working time and balancing work and non-working life : working time arrangem. (1) • Indicators on evening, night, Saturday or Sunday work are easy to obtain but again difficult to interpret without introducing subjective elements

9. Working time and balancing work and non-working life : working time arrangem. (2) • Share of employees with flexible work schedules corresponds to many individual or collective means to vary hours from one week to another (cf. annex of the Resolution on working time adopted by 18th CIST in december 2008) • 20.6% of employees report in French LFS having flextime from one week to the next but is it voluntary or involuntary?

10. Working time and balancing work and non-working life : balancing work and non-working life (1) • Ratio of employment for women with children puts the question of ages to adopt for both • In France, the threshold of 3 years for children is crucial • Regarding maternity, paternity or parental leave, data are much weaker

11. Working time and balancing work and non-working life : balancing work and non-working life (2) • Need of information on child care services • The question of the care of elderly will be more and more important • The question of the other social times than the time devoted to the family is also important

12. Security of employment and social protection : security of employment (1) • Percentage of employees >= 25 years with temporary jobs raises 2 questions : the age to retain and the definition of temporary jobs • Then, how to interpret these rates?

13. Security of employment and social protection : security of employment (2) • Job tenure : a concept ambiguous and difficult to interpret • Need to develop a more dynamic approach…

14. Security of employment and social protection : security of employment (3) • … with transitions analysis • Cf. question of securing professional pathes • But difficult to measure and above all to compare

15. Security of employment and social protection : social security • Except the indicators on unemployment insurance, the proposed indicators do not have any direct link with Quality of Employment (ex. public social security expenditure as share of GDP) • Share of employees covered by unemployment insurance (72% in France) is not either very indicative of QE • Using share of unemployed receiving benefits or average rate of benefits to the unemployed compared to their former wage seems better

16. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION