Individuals’ yearning for fulfilling work matching their life choices implies that the social partners and politicians rethink the social contract, explains Denis Pennel, who wrote a book called, « Travailler pour soi – Quel avenir pour le travail à l’heure de la révolution individualiste ? » (“Working for yourself: what future for labor at the time of the individualist revolution?”) He is also the managing director of the International Confederation of Private Employment Agencies (Ciett), and proposes 15 recommendations to “adjust social gains inherited from the industrial era to this individualistic revolution.” (Ref. 130652)
- By calling for a recast of the social contract, you imply that it is outdated. How so?
Denis Pennel. One of the initial assumptions of the book is that what we’re experiencing is not so much an employment crisis as a labor revolution. This can sound like provocation when you know that a little over 3 million people are without a job in France – 26 million in Europe – but this crisis hides much deeper, more structural labor market changes. The causes are known: globalization, new technologies, expansion of the service sector, and so on. But, I believe, there is one undervalued, underestimated trend: the increasingly individual labor relation. Our entire society has been affected by this rise in art, politics and habits but, strangely, the labor market and employment relation have been spared.
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