Whereas Lhe Christmas holidays have just started this weekend, it is also the beginning of an intense period of work for the seasonal workers. A job that has changed a lot in recent years. Seasonal workers who were about a million each year, to live the summer at the beach, and to work there. And then, do the same in winter, in ski resorts.
If we want to simplify the diagram a little, there are fewer and fewer of them. Many have changed their way of life in recent months, so much so that the ski resorts today are lacking in hands. There are still thousands of positions to be filled. How to explain this? We talk about it with Jean Viard, sociologist, research director at CNRS.
franceinfo: How to explain that after the sudden end of the winter sports season in 2020, many seasonal workers have decided not to resume?
Jean Viard: First, it must be said that this is a phenomenon that is general in bars and restaurants, and in tourist resorts, because these are populations of workers who are very poorly paid, who work evenings and weekends. and who have no compensation, and a large part of them are paid at the minimum wage. They have just negotiated 5% above the minimum wage; for a long-term job, it doesn’t go very far, so it’s a poorly paid world. You shouldn’t hide behind your little finger, which is also why there are a lot of immigrants and a lot of young people.
Me, when I was young, in the 60s / 70s, there were kinds of lords. There were those who did Saint-Tropez in the summer, then they went up to Serre-Chevalier, they were the seasonal workers of the big resorts. It was half sea and half mountain. It was a bit “Club Med imaginary”, they were tanned, they seduced the ladies, or the ladies seduced the gentlemen. By going to work there, where you could both go to the sea in summer and go skiing in winter. And in fact, by being paid, while the others paid to be there, it is a bit like that.
And then it moved. The problem that is complicated in seasonal workers, especially in mountain resorts, is that since we rent everything we can, since in fact it makes a living from the rental, the resorts, it is sure that if you free up rooms for seasonal workers, it’s rooms that don’t bring in anything.
Suddenly, the seasonal workers, we piled them up, we put them in the cellar, in the corners where there is no light. Moreover, there had been a major operation by Anicet Le Pors, a former minister of 81, because there was a lot of AIDS, so I think that with the Covid it is the same thing, therefore, the job has lost, if I may say so, its post-war nobility, to become a bit of a job of jobbers. And so, obviously, it changes the attractiveness.
And the recent reform of unemployment insurance has also severely penalized seasonal workers. What Emmanuel Macron, the President of the Republic assumes:
“The system had become hypocritical, he said, raising in particular the case of seasonal workers. There are some of our compatriots who say to themselves: it is not worth it for me to go to work, and therefore that is why we have implemented this unemployment insurance reform. And that’s why, for example, we said: You have to have worked six months, and four more months, to be entitled to unemployment … “
Work six months and no longer four to have the right to unemployment, that is a game-changer for seasonal workers. Does this also testify to a form of misunderstanding, the fact that the seasonal lifestyle is not necessarily well accepted today in France?
Jean Viard: There were some sort of arrangements, yes – we do a short contract, then I fire you, you’re unemployed, you come back to work, and basically I pay you part time and you get paid full time – therefore, there were such processes, and we must not hide that we are in a period of exit from mass unemployment, and therefore indeed, the machine must get back on track. It was the same when we had to get out of inflation.
On the other hand, society is thought of on the model of the wage society and in fact, there are a lot of people, especially young people, who, basically, are quite hungry, so to speak, of a non-wage relation, with the problems of the cost of social protection for unemployment, sickness and retirement. This is also the case with auto-entrepreneurs, the type of Uber, etc. Because indeed, they do not have retirement or in very, very limited conditions. We are here in a shift.
And I was looking the other day in the United States, there are 20% of the people who were telecommuting in the United States during the pandemic, who disappeared because they set up freelance. So there is an explosion of independents. We see that in France too, the explosion of small grocery stores, bookstores and shops. There are a lot of people who say to themselves after all, we were good, no boss on the back, well we’re going to try our luck, even if we earn a little less well in a nicer place than the big city.
And all these movements which are in front of us, I believe that we must look at them all in their complexity and we must think about the social protection of the self-employed. This is an extremely important project for the future of these new populations.