The resistible rise of the temporary employment industry in France

Abstract

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.

The changing nature of labour regulation: the distinctiveness of the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry

“…As noted by Brook and Purcell (), institutions and industries are dynamic social phenomena and transformation is through the actors involved. Below the surface since 1981, the roles of the actors propping up NAECI have changed, with the first major shift occurring in the early 1990s as the state became more distant as regulator of industrial relations.…”

“…Earlier work, such as Frege and Kelly (), emphasises the significance of union strategies in labour regulation, while Shibata () calls for recognition of workers' agency as capital restructures. Brook and Purcell (, p. 20) also affirm that institutions ‘are simultaneously reproduced and transformed by the actions of the actors that inhabit them’. Finally, Inversi et al (, p. 296) argue for an ‘actor‐centred approach’ to regulation, which investigates roles, competences and accountability of the ‘players’ across multilevel pathways in time and space, to better understand the redistribution of power among actors and labour regulation complexities.…”

The potential of archival methods in industrial relations, sociology of work, management and HRM research: a case study of the relationship between temporary employment agencies and the state in the UK during the 1980s

“…Indeed, in the early 1980s, amidst a deepening economic recession the very co-existence of private fee-charging temporary employment agencies alongside a publicly funded employment service was being questioned by many and was the subject of much academic and policy debate. Whilst some attention has focused on the historical evolution of the agency industry, both in the UK and elsewhere (Gonos 1997;Brook and Purcell 2020), relatively little attention has focused on the forces shaping the relationship between private agencies and the state and the long-term impact of these on the development of the private employment agency industry.…”