Philippe Askenazy

David Spencer, professeur d’économie politique à l’université de Leeds, est l’un des penseurs britanniques du travail les plus influents. Son livre Making Light Work apporte une contribution à la fois importante et pédagogique à la littérature sur la qualité du travail. Il prend plus la forme d’un essai que d’un ouvrage académique comme son précédent livre The Political Economy of Work (Routledge, 2009). Paru en 2022, Making Light Work évoque la période de la crise sanitaire liée au Covid-19 ...

This research connects the literature on crisis management and on firm flexibility to investigate human resource (HR) strategies in response to unexpected crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic. Leveraging data from French workplaces we identify five main types of strategies implemented during the first lockdown, which go beyond the massive use of teleworking or the use of short‐time work. The analysis demonstrates that a combination of preexisting HR practices (teleworking agreements, wage levels, risk exposure, and health and safety committees) and public policies (short‐time programs, legislation on short‐time contracts, and temps) influences which of these five strategies firms adopt.

Despite growing interest in the firm bargaining process, little research focuses on the structure of bargaining within multi‐establishment firms. We question whether running negotiations at the workplace level and/or firm level is a strategic choice for employers. We hypothesize that the level chosen depends on the geography of the firm. Employers face a trade‐off: workplace bargaining is more efficient because it meets local conditions; yet higher level negotiations increase coordination costs for workers and weakens their bargaining power, which can benefit the employer. Using a French representative survey, we find a significant relation between the level of bargaining within a firm and the number, spatial distribution and heterogeneity of its establishments, suggesting that the structure of multi‐establishment firms can inform the level at which collective bargaining takes place.

Background: Mobility of workers living in one country and working in a different country has increased in the European Union. Exposed to commuting factors, cross-border workers (CBWs) constitute a potential high-risk population. But the relationships between health and commuting abroad are under-documented. Our aims were to: (1) measure the prevalence of the perceived health status and the physical health outcomes (activity limitation, chronic diseases, disability and no leisure activities), (2) analyse their associations with commuting status as well as (3) with income and health index among CBWs. Methods: Based on the ‘Enquête Emploi’, the French cross-sectional survey segment of the European Labour Force Survey (EU LFS), the population was composed of 2,546,802 workers. Inclusion criteria for the samples were aged between 20 and 60 years and living in the French cross-border departments of Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The Health Index is an additional measure obtained with five health variables. A logistic model was used to estimate the odds ratios of each group of CBWs, taking non-cross border workers (NCBWs) as the reference group, controlling by demographic background and labour status variables. Results: A sample of 22,828 observations (2456 CBWs vs. 20,372 NCBWs) was retained. The CBW status is negatively associated with chronic diseases and disability. A marginal improvement of the health index is correlated with a wage premium for both NCBWs and CBWs. Commuters to Luxembourg have the best health outcomes, whereas commuters to Germany the worst. Conclusion: CBWs are healthier and have more income. Interpretations suggest (1) a healthy cross-border phenomenon steming from a social selection and a positive association between income and the health index is confirmed; (2) the existence of major health disparities among CBWs; and (3) the rejection of the spillover phenomenon assumption for CBWs. The newly founded European Labour Authority (ELA) should take into account health policies as a promising way to support the cross-border mobility within the European Union.

The recent successes in ai research have fuelled an often-alarming discourse about the possible obsolescence of human work. While various actors find an interest in disseminating such a message, as computer scientists and economists, our analysis is necessarily speculative and underlines the technological and social limits of artificial intelligence. This leads us to reverse the problematic: coupled to robots, would ai be enough to allow western societies closed to immigration to respond to the challenges of the 21^st century which will require a lot of work?

We examine the strategy to reduce sickness absences of transit drivers in one of the leading Multinational Operators for Local Transport Services in France. Absenteeism dramatically rose as a result of this strategy. Using observations and interviews at the corporate and field levels, and company data, we disentangle the mechanisms that led to this failure. In a context of strong constraints especially from local communities, the strategy based on underlining the costs of absences pushed local units to change their management practices. They focused on chasing short absences, promoted presenteeism and intensified pressure on workers rather than boosting prevention. Eventually, long‐duration sickness leaves massively expanded.

Resumen: En este estudio comparativo, los autores analizan los vínculos entre las relaciones laborales y los ajustes salariales o de plantilla tras la crisis de 2007–2008, a partir de dos encuestas comparables sobre empresas de Gran Bretaña (WERS) y de Francia (REPONSE) en 2010–2012. Pese a las diferencias contextuales (composición del tejido productivo, circunstancias temporales e intensidad de la crisis), los vínculos entre las relaciones laborales y las estrategias de ajuste son parecidos (la presencia sindical no logra evitar los ajustes). Por lo tanto, la diferenciación de los sistemas de relaciones laborales no permite explicar las divergencias entre las modalidades de ajuste a nivel macroeconómico.

In this comparative study, the authors analyse the relationships between industrial relations and workforce or wage adjustments in response to the 2007–08 crisis, using two highly comparable establishment‐level surveys conducted in Great Britain (WERS) and France (REPONSE) in 2010–12. Notwithstanding contextual differences in the countries’ productive systems and the timing and impact of the crisis, the relationships between industrial relations and adjustment strategies appear to have been similar (trade union presence not preventing adjustments). Differences in industrial relations are therefore not found to provide an explanation for the different modes of adjustment observed at the macroeconomic level.