job insecurity in the denial of life

Summary
• Summary
• Abstract
• Introduction
• The specter of insecurity
• Insecurity, temporality, desire
• Paths to positivity
• Denial of life
Summary
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Multidimensional, the precariousness of employment in companies "developed" has multiple meanings, both objective and subjective, personal and collective. While individual situations are infinitely various, long-term unemployment and / or recurrent inevitably leads those affected to experiment with altering their relationship to time and desire. The symptomatic effect is generally interpreted by organizations or managers of unemployment assistance as a lack of "motivation" that act as barriers to a positive output to employment. But these agencies to review and consider the special cases as part of an emerging normative order which tends to produce rules negating anomic life.
Keywords: Job insecurity, unemployment, normative, identity, desire.
Abstract
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Social precariousness and the denial of the living subject
The precariousness of contemporary advanced societies in emploi Is a Phenomenon with Multiple Meanings multidimensional, objective and subjective, personal and collective. While individual "situations are INFINITELY Varied long term or recurring chômage invariably leads to Those Who Are subjected it to undergo a year of weathering Their relationship to time and to Their desires. The managerial institutions Usually Symptomatic interpret this effect as a LACK of "motivation" which Becomes year barrier to a positive return to employment. In fact, institutions thesis Develop Criteria Within a year of jugement Emerging normative order tend to Produce That anomic That rules negate the living subject.
Key-Words: Precariousness, (a) emploi, normative order, identity, desire.
Introduction
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When she refers to the social vulnerability, that is to say an "area of instability and turbulence populated by people insecure in their relationship to work and fragile in relational integration (1), job insecurity can be defined as experienced a social situation characterized by uncertainty essential, both physical and existential, which tends to relegate the subject to margins of society and lock them in a present without a future. It refers to a reality and a multidimensional experience, both intimate and collective, objective and imagined, worked by the dynamics of power relations, shifting forms of institutionalization and their modes of legitimation.
Although the specter of insecurity haunts long companies and feeds anxieties in Western households best protected, it has relevance to sociological and political analysis at the light of socio-historical, cultural and concrete policies to which it belongs. The interpretation of identity issues - with respect to time, desire, emancipatory dynamic - which is currently facing the most vulnerable people among the European context of underemployment, loss of employment (decent) and at the other extreme, excessive intensification of work rhythms. Throughout the analysis, it appears that the context is also that of an emerging normative indifferent to the fate of specific individuals.
The specter of insecurity
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As always historically and socially located, job insecurity can be embodied in the figures and take different forms, but its persistence through the ages did not make it an ontological category. In the sense of vulnerability, it is neither a law of nature nor does the notion of risk, contrary to what is suggested in a rhetorical fashion. When eminent representatives of French employers say: "Life, health, love are precarious. [...] The precariousness, that's life. It's good for employment is good for life "(2), they assimilate to the precariousness of the finitude of the human condition. And when business leaders say they are the first affected by insecurity, as has been heard in France when the crisis of the CPE (First Employment Contract), they are an amalgam suggesting that insecurity is inseparable from freedom of choice, freedom of enterprise. In both cases, it is forgotten that the risks of insecurity are also "naturally" distributed in society. Today, social insecurity focuses almost everywhere in Europe (and U.S.) on certain categories of people: youth, women, low-skilled employees, foreigners and minorities more or less " visible, and, increasingly, the "senior". This suffices to indicate that precariousness is not a matter of freedom or choice. It is rooted in socio-historical processes and policies that lead to hardship suffered.
In terms of individual situations in the process of socio-historical work (or lack thereof) is a key explanatory variable without which there is no rigorous analysis of uncertainty and dynamics of poverty associated with it. This is true, it seems (3), since the mid-fourteenth century, when the terms of the opposition between work and assistance have been set in England, which led the poor, so far "images of Christ (4), to be considered unemployed in which the onus of proving their community and their anchorage real inability to work or face persecution and punishment as "useless in the world" (5). But it is important to remember that history does not repeat itself. Robert Castel has already unearthed the figure of the vagrant and showed how it was responding to "new" poor today. It also showed that in modern times, the issue of social vulnerability arose with reference to the recent past, that is to say, the wage system. The latter has played a major role in the short period known as the Thirty Glorious Years during which countries 'development' had managed to stem the social vulnerability to an unprecedented degree. The notable exception, easily minus since it is reduced to a mere parenthesis function of history clearly demonstrates that there is no inevitability to the precariousness of the masses, even if the "social compromise" put in place since the end of the Second World War was not enough to solve the philosophical problem, practice and policy of social injustice. This "bracket" is now more or less close (because there are still some core stability and protection in employment), particularly with the deterioration of working conditions, the "balkanization forms of employment (6), spalling of the benefits associated with wages, the persistence of mass unemployment and the lengthening of its duration, our society is again confronted with the dangers of poverty and insecurity of the masses.
One country to another and even from one individual to another, however, there are gradations in the sense of vulnerability felt both in case of threat, imagined or real, of losing his job, as in situations of recurrent unemployment and more or less prolonged. The specter of insecurity haunts often a fraction much larger sets of populations that consist of social groups that have already swung into the vulnerability, which grow or are exposed repeatedly. For example, while temporary employment contracts in France are only 15-18% of all existing contracts, and the average length of a CDI (permanent contract) has increased to an average of eleven years and a half in 2006, a recent survey reveals that the majority of French people consider themselves at risk of becoming "homeless". Conversely, while fearing for themselves, the French majority to believe that assistance benefits rather encourage their beneficiaries to be content and not seek work (7). Furthermore, we see that the constellation of "interim status" or contracts "atypical" work situations does not necessarily subjectively experienced by stakeholders as "abnormally" painful. Thus, some put up in temporary and reach (at least for a significant time) to draw the desired resources to build their lives. Still others "would move" in a form of insecurity sometimes called "inactivity trap" (8). It is clear that the relationship between forms of employment and the subjective experience of insecurity is nothing unique and mechanical (9).
Anyway, the "fear of loss" felt in danger of insecurity by those who are (still) in use - and express their concerns in a very contradictory - certainly feeds the persistence of unemployment mass and lengthening its duration. It is probably also favored by the declining quality of rights and protections guaranteed by the social contract in most European countries, notably France but also Germany, Belgium, United Kingdom (10) and elsewhere. Can you qualify this statement by asking what happens when the precarious cease to be, rightly or wrongly, an imagined threat to become an experienced situation? It affects primarily the most "fragile", which include "assisted" a good part of the whole component working poverty and most of those placement services for labor rank for some reason or another, implicitly or otherwise, among the "unemployable". All these are far from being considered "useless to the world. However, there are those who "get away" and others not. The first would they have less fear?
Insecurity, temporality, desire
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The question could be rephrased as: why did he desire not always sufficient force to engage these people-oriented here on routes that could lead to a "self-individual" within the meaning of Axel Honneth (11)? Two recent qualitative surveys conducted in France will shed light to this problem. The first was conducted by the author in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais with a group of ex-textile workers laid off by Levi's in 1999 as a result of offshoring. These women were followed in their path jobseekers for six years. The second was conducted between 2003 and late 2004 in a department of Ile-de-France on the occasion of a reform of the RMI (revenu minimum d'insertion). One hundred and fifty RMI have been encountered on this occasion and that forty participants (agents insertion and placement of manpower, social workers, association leaders, city and county, trainers, etc..) (12).
Altered relation to time
In both cases, these investigations we are in the presence of long-term unemployed. Time is clearly a fundamental role in the experience of prolonged unemployment or precarious employment. All approaches, qualitative or quantitative, reveal a correlation between longer duration of unemployment and "employability", that is to say, the probability of (re) employment: access to labor market is even more unlikely that the duration of unemployment is long. But the correlation is not causality, what is at stake for the individual to gradually lengthen as the duration of his unemployment?
Very frequently altered in relation to time symptomatically manifested in the behavior of the man or woman who does not go to, or arrives late, or just one day and the other not. Social workers and other leaders there are usually a sign that the lack of "socialization" as is typical of those "isolated". They try to rehabilitate, to "re-socialize" them by subjecting them to tests of more or less stringent punctuality from which they intend to measure progress "insertion" made. Where in the investigation of the RMI, we asked participants to explain this strange concept, "resocialization," they seemed to think that we had no idea what happens in reality concrete. When asked why he would be so important to bring the recipients simply for maintenance and offer them nothing else, they responded (13):
"- To break their isolation: leaving home, maintain social ties, make a step towards the rehabilitation [...].
- Some phobias, or are in a geographic and economic situation such that they must learn to leave their homes, so they do not remain isolated. It is done gradually. First, teach them to walk to meet us and then leave their town. And so on: they cross the stage. They must relearn. "

This speaker will talk of people living in the countryside. A professional noticed in urban, there was also a great isolation.
"- They are isolated from what? How do we restore the social bond?
- By daily contact, through trade. [...]
- We are following seventy-five per year. These people are just socialized because they have been through individual interviews.
- They are socialized?
- Yes, they have had contact with people who ask to have a job. That is to say they are not very isolated and do not come for the first time in an association. They are in a dynamic job search. [They are socialized] because they come to visit, they meet a social code.
- What social code?
- Come on time. They want to get out. "
France is far from being the only country where the alteration of the relationship to time is turned on an intuitive representation (and moralistic) of the "socialization" of the unemployed. The most striking example encountered during our surveys is the case of this young German guest unemployed for a month to run every day at six o'clock in the morning before a deposit of garbage collection, and then left free do something else. It illustrates, albeit grotesque, mind techniques "resocialization" is judged from a utilitarian vision normalized and expected result of an act or measure, without wondering if the major stakeholders are reasonably able to invest them with meaning for themselves.
We must therefore go further to try to better understand the issue of time and its deeper meanings. The testimony of textile workers here is very useful. Barely a year after their dismissal, they had a rather mysterious and paradoxical formula for expressing this altered relationship to time. One of them said:
"When we were at Levi's, we had time. Now, no time. "
How is it that when, precisely, where they had "objectively" all the time - they were not employed at the plant and touched on unemployment benefits - they felt they had none? And conversely, how could they say they had before, when they refer to a time when they got up at five o'clock in the morning to prepare for their day and their families, then went to the factory where they found work at the chain, off again late in the day, cleaning out their children, returning home, busy with household chores? Yves Clot, who did not fail to encounter this problem in its own case studies gave insights into his remarkable analysis of the psychological function of work (14). By its centrality, the work represents a special opportunity to live in our societies multiple temporalities, and experience and a certain distance to the self that is vital to the balance staff. Have time, while working, is to have time. The time for yourself, time for others and for other things. These temporal world are not separated from each other by borders sealed, and they hold together through a system of meanings which move from one world to another (self, work, family, friends, society ), which echo, can tie past, present and future, live the present to itself and to project into the future. That is why the work has no absolute value. It makes sense for the subjects in the report of cooperation and competition that the work activity has with other areas of life (personal, family and / or social).
The work no longer fulfills this psychological function in two situations: when the work pace intensified to become "untenable" (15) or when deprived of work. Then the topic "no time". It is submerged in a strictly subjectively temporality that gives him more psychic availability, the "distance themselves" need to develop the project and meanings that are in the world. Contrary to the idea that their companions do it, this situation does not "passivity" on the part of subjects. Instead, they react to external aggression (the deprivation of work, his excessive intensification) engaging in any activity consisting in rehashing suffered its inability to subjective excessive costs. This is what Yves Clot calls the "boredom" (16).
Paths of desire
How does it occur and idleness that is the desire in this journey? Judging from the testimony of licensed textiles, the test of idleness does not occur instantaneously at the time of entry into unemployment. For those women who had worked for ten, twenty or thirty years at the factory, the dismissal has certainly represented a trauma. As has been said one of them:
"It's a nuclear bomb that fell over us like that, which was tidal wave ..."
However, after the initial shock, they were full of hope. For example, and quite typically, many have benefited first month to refurbish their homes. Maybe they were trying to escape from reality:
"... The first month [...] I have every shot, I made the wallpaper, I wiped out all [...]. As if I cut myself in the world ... not to be in the reality of things, the thing that happens. "
They then "killed" all the work remained outstanding. They have however done in a hurry, because they lived the first month as a time when they had last time. Much time, but a limited time:
"- I feel a certain hand, it had all the time, the impression we were going to get a job immediately after.
- Yes, yes, that.
- We hurried in fact saying, we will do that in one day. We had the impression that there would be something.
- It's true we had the impression that it was an unexpected shutdown, and then we would leave at once. That we had to do what we had to do. And then we realized that not ... "
And they were cast in the future, wanting to "turn the page" clothing and engage in another life. At first they were considering their situation as an opportunity.
"But I know that once I had made several proposals in various areas [...]. The flowers, working in school canteens for children with disabilities, catering ... We had tried a lot of ideas together [...]. We said: we will try to offer the most to say at least they come to us to find a job other than sewing. It still had that hope ... "
However, faced with the reality of job search and injunctions of institutions for their support, they almost all had the experience of a gradual closure of the horizon of possibilities. Described elsewhere (17), this experiment is part of a political logic flow management and handling of articles or less indifferent to the fate of specific individuals. It is the adaptation of people "fragile" to the existing order, an order reducing the "hard realities of the labor market" and improperly opposed to the "illusions" of the unemployed. For interested people, the result is a belief induced by repetitive steps and short-lived (18), and also by the surroundings, that nothing is possible for oneself. It is a forced learning of mourning itself. Hence the atrophy of psychic life which is referred to idleness: why go out, get out of bed, dressing, her ironing when no other time to experiment outside the strictly subjective , a confrontation with oneself? To use the expressions that appear repeatedly in interviews, you feel "down" you will not want to do anything at home, and then the day passes, and other days go again: it closes.