of employment without any prospect of recovery, is then an option that the public employment services risk practicing by default or by political choice. The debate here is complex, since many public policies, particularly in France, aim to compensate for the effects of a labor cost deemed excessive by some employers through employment subsidies. A distinction must be made here between, on the one hand, general policies to lower labor costs, which carry the risk of weakening the attractiveness of workers who would be better supported by vocational training policies, a pessimistic and ultimately stigmatizing signal, and, on the other hand, targeted and massive subsidies aimed at reintegrating a category of workers by putting them back into employment at a high price, a voluntarist signal.
But another type of exit behavior, on the contrary, shows a very good capacity for negotiation: emancipatory employability can be manifested by an individual’s ability to leave a company to develop in another. It would be wrong to oppose exit and voice
Finally, the question of sorting and including people calls for much discussion. If employability based on capabilities is “inclusive” from the outset, taking into account the variety of aptitudes and projects, employability as a managerial imperative must avoid the trap of favoring the initiatives of the most dynamic to the detriment of the least favored. Moreover, employability as it is highlighted and practiced in the labor market brings to the forefront the sorting of people according to their distance from a return to employment. This sorting is then reversed in the case of public interventions: the aim is to provide more help to those who need it most. However, there is a borderline, which is not always clear-cut and which sometimes changes, between people who are not very employable and who will benefit from intensive efforts, and people who are deemed to be slightly less employable and who will be pushed out of normal employment, either into sheltered employment or into inactivity with the risk of relegation. A pathway can then be envisaged in the case of people who regain a foothold in protected activities, and gradually gain access to normal employment thanks to the accumulation of experience and the promotion of successive circuits. However, there is also a risk of practicing the tyranny of the project for people for whom this is neither the desire nor the horizon. This leads to the question of the variety of itineraries and also of enterprises, market, non-market, cooperatives and so on.
Taking into account experiences of entrepreneurial creation in addition to work as an employee, oblique itineraries, clarification of sorting and counter-sorting practices, validation, and also invalidation and rehabilitation both on the labor market and within companies: these less explored dimensions converge towards a demand for collective control of the labor market as well as of companies, aimed at countering excluding polarizations and guaranteeing sufficient opportunities for the future. We can then come full circle, by returning to our starting point, that of the unfair and inefficient transfer of the burden of adaptation onto individuals, characteristic of truncated versions of employability. Individual initiative and risk-taking, whether they set themselves market or non-market objectives, must be valued and equipped with a set of institutions and guarantees. In particular, pressure should be brought to bear on companies or organizations that do not play the game, and the complementarity between exit and voice, which is rarely given and most often has to be constructed, should be used to open up the space for individual choice.
Economics can be interested in the conditions under which companies practicing employability based on capacity can develop and their practices spread; just as it can seek out the conditions of organization of the labor market that allow companies and their employees to move towards protected mobility. Symmetrically, sociology – and psychology with it – can look more deeply into the individual and collective support points from which each person can benefit in order to negotiate with others and with him or herself at the bifurcation points of a personal and professional itinerary, whether in the company or in an employment agency. Management can work, among other things, on the meeting between the tools for identifying employability internally and those implemented by placement agencies and training organizations: skills directories, sectoral forecasts, bridges between branches or diplomas and so on.
The particular context of the publication of this book, with the challenges arising from the coronavirus health crisis, seems to relegate the concerns we have just reviewed to the background. This is not the case, and the numerous job losses and restructurings that are announced for the following years show, on the contrary, a challenge that is that of the collective construction not only of employment, but also of autonomous and emancipating employability understood simultaneously as a series of intertwined public practices and guarantees, a “total organizational fact” to be extended and reinforced, a “managerial imperative”, in short as a central political issue in our society.
Introduction written by Bernard GAZIER.
1
Employability and Public Policy: A Century-long Learning Process and Unfinished Process
Understood as the ability to obtain and keep a “normal” job, that is, one that is not protected, employability is a century-old term that is being used more and more widely. It finds a natural field of application in the context of job renewal: rather than protecting a worker in a job, it is advisable to develop his or her professional capacity to adapt to future jobs, his or her employability.
For a long time, it was a concept developed and used by social and health practitioners confronted with the differentiated care of the unemployed: social workers, placement office agents, administrative authorities, doctors, trainers and so on. Researchers or specialists in an academically recognized discipline such as economics, sociology, education sciences or human resources management, came to grips with it later, and extended it to all categories of active workers, whether in employment or not.
However, the term remains controversial. The public debate seems to oscillate between fuzzy acceptance and virulent rejection. In the field of public policy, the term employability is indeed fraught with concrete issues and also with collective potentially stigmatizing or reproachful, representations. Using it often means focusing attention on individual aptitudes and motivations, seeming to exonerate the other actors in the labor market, and in particular companies, from any responsibility for access to employment or job quality (Orianne and Conter 2007). Actors and institutions that use the notion of employability can also, and even more simply, be accused of endorsing a market representation of human capacities to the detriment of the integrity and autonomy of individuals.
But the context of the early 2020s, with the health crisis and its repercussions on the economy and employment, as well as the increasingly pressing challenges of the environment, provides renewed justification for using the term employability. Indeed, the necessary adaptation should take place with important changes in the nature and requirements of the available jobs, just think of the development of “green” jobs or the expected rise of the electric car. The challenges of massive reconversions are emerging, and the development of employability, which has been at the heart of projects and practices to secure professional careers for the past 20 years, is becoming a crucial imperative. But what kind of employability can and should we be talking about?
Based on a series of works carried out during the 1980s and 1990s (Gazier 1990; Gazier 1999) and extended more recently (Bruggeman et al. 2012; Gazier 2017), this contribution will proceed in two stages. First, it will focus on the major operational versions of employability that have been developed for more than a hundred years in the field of public policies
