Seasonal workers have become a rare pearl. How to ensure good recruitment for the coming summer? What’s wrong with all of these trades? The decryption of sociologist Jean Viard.
The hotel and catering industry is already having a hard time recruiting during the year. So what about the summer period? In the middle of the holidays, the sector needs even more seasonal workers. Nothing is simple. The government presented what it called a “seasonal plan” this week. Last summer there were 150,000 positions. Half of these positions have not been filled.
franceinfo: What no longer appeals to Jean Viard in these professions?
John Viard: First, there is a problem with all the professions, very restrictive for everyday life, since the pandemic. And then people are very unstable, as we are short of staff, we are looking for them everywhere, so if you are not very happy with your job, you leave, you say nothing, so there is a huge problem of permanence people. Basically, you no longer want to work every night. This is also true for very long distance heavy goods vehicle drivers, who no longer want to spend a week alone in their truck and come back from time to time at the weekend.
So the pandemic has given us the idea that the art of living comes first. Afterwards, there are places where we have adapted. Places, no. There are hotel-restaurants, bars that house their staff. There are others who have changed their hours. There are many restaurants now that are only open five days a week. There are lots of changes in the profession to try to integrate this idea of quality of life into the background. Afterwards, there is a particular problem with seasonal workers. It turns out that we talked about it last week, during our lunch at the Elysée with sociologists. We gave ideas we had to the President of the Republic.
Personally, the idea that was close to my heart, the one I saw in Belgium, is that any young person aged 16 to 26 can work for 4,000 euros a year, they do two or three months of work without any dependent but declared, but which effectively allow young people to be motivated to work, in economically satisfactory conditions, by being declared, so that counts for their retirement.
We have to go to these reflections, because it is also the idea that a well-educated young person is a young person who has worked a little during his studies. I believe that the model where you study first, then try to find a job, is a model that is a bit outdated in such complex societies. I think that a young person who has worked one or two months or one weekend per month during his studies is a young person who will find work more easily. If he works too much, no, because then he misses his studies.
So the question is: how do we stimulate in youth, the human relationship, what is created, what we learn, respect for the rules, also respect for the boss, organizations, all that, these are things which can be learned, and I think that we need to be encouraged by attractive economic conditions to move towards seasonal work.
The government’s plan is more broadly focused on training or support at the end of the contract. Are these two different ways of looking at the problem?
So I believe in this impulse. It’s not so much a question of training because in the seasonal trades, there are different trades. There is the entire hotel and catering industry, everything related to the agricultural world, which are even tougher jobs. And we had seen during the pandemic, since there was no longer a way to have foreign seasonal workers, we said: we will only take French seasonal workers, there are not many who have stayed long in pick strawberries. Because these are extremely physically demanding jobs, and that’s why the problems are not the same everywhere.
And then there is another seasonal profile, not the students, but the professionals who have taken on this habit, more established, of chopped up careers, summer, winter, with breaks in between, you also have to think of them?
But of course, there are many people who are like that. 30 or 40 years ago, what was very honorable in the world of tourism, it was basically to do the coast in the summer, and the ski resorts in the winter. It was almost the Rolls-Royce of these populations. That too, it seems to me, is a little less fashionable, but again, it has led to very complex family lives. It means moving, living six months a year in one place, six months in another, so again, I think we come back to questions of lifestyle, it’s less fashionable than it has summer.
But it must also be said that after the war, going on vacation was very rare, so those who did these jobs, they lived all year round in vacation country. Today, 60% of people go on vacation, so going on these jobs is less different than the life they would have if they weren’t working, because they will manage to go on vacation anyway .