Platform work has grown significantly in the last decade. High-profile legal cases have highlighted the grey area which platform work inhabits in terms of the employment relationship and have raised concerns about the quality and conditions of work. Platform operators claim they are neutral intermediaries, yet often control over scheduling and tasks lies with them. This article presents a theoretical framework that integrates macro and micro-level analyses to account for the production of hegemony and playing out of consent, coercion and resistance within platform work. It does so by rearticulating Burawoy’s concept of hegemonic despotism by drawing upon Foucauldian notions of neoliberal governmentality and reasserting the centrality of Gramsci’s work in understanding power and hegemony, in particular the concept of contradictory consciousness and the dialogical contest between hegemonic ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’, which constitutes our understanding and sense-making in the social world.
Numerical flexibility is commonly promoted as a driver of employment growth. However, contingent work is frequently associated with "bad jobs", particularly for those in low skilled occupations. Agency work is a common and growing form of contingent work and is often promoted as a tool for facilitating the labour market integration of young workers. In France, young agency workers make up a significant part of the labour force within car assembly plants. Studies have shown that these workers have harsher working conditions than permanent co-workers and are subject to a "despotic" factory regime. However, the triangular relationship, which frames the agency contract, may give rise to a more complex outcome in which the aspiration for stable employment mediates the coercion of labour market vulnerability.
This article is an historical account of the contested growth of the temporary employment agency sector in France. It utilises a variegated capitalism conceptual framework to explain the evolution of a distinctive temporary employment agency sector and regulatory environment under French politicoinstitutional conditions that was contingent upon global developments. The article charts the role of large agencies in constructing a market for agency labour despite wide scale cultural, political and trade union opposition. In order to build legitimacy, agencies sought partners in the labour movement from the late 1960s onwards. By the late 1990s, the sector had grown significantly within a gradually more permissive regulatory framework despite ongoing but fragmenting opposition. The article demonstrates that the growth of agency labour was not an inevitable outcome of global pressure for labour market deregulation. It also reveals how national regulatory institutions alone are not a sufficient bulwark against global labour market pressures.
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