Report · 2016
Travail, emploi, numérique : les nouvelles trajectoires
[Work, employment and digital technology: new trajectories — Conseil national du numérique (French national digital council) report to the Minister of Labour, January 2016]
Report submitted to Myriam El Khomri on 6 January 2016, intended to feed into the labour law bill, on the transformations of employment linked to digital technology.
The report was submitted to Myriam El Khomri on 6 January 2016 to feed into the labour law bill. That bill went on to become one of the most contested pieces of legislation of the presidential term, which is what makes this entry interesting well beyond its own content.
The question it raises is that of the real weight of advisory work. A report submitted ahead of a bill that the streets contest six months later cannot be judged by how many of its recommendations were taken up. It has to be judged by what it managed to shift within a balance of power where analysis was no longer the deciding variable.
On substance, two of the 2016 findings hold up, and one analytical framework has been superseded. The rise of multiple-job-holding and of atypical forms of employment, documented from the data available at the time, has been confirmed.
The question of “uberisation”, on the other hand, central to the report, no longer arises in the terms of 2016. The debate back then was about inventing some intermediate status between employment and self-employment. It was settled elsewhere and otherwise: through case law, which reclassified several platform-work relationships as employment contracts, and then through the European route, with the platform work directive. The report was looking for a third way that existing law ultimately absorbed.
This shift deserves noting for what it has in common with other work from this period: the solution came from the courts and from Brussels, not from the French legislator we were advising.