Employment and work. The large gap. A book of Françoise Piotet (Armand Colin, 2007, 261 p.)
The work of Françoise Piotet is established on the distinction between the two notions, non-synonymous, those of work and employment. The thread of the book is to analyze the way in which the two realities covered by these terms are interrelated, interact with each other. The introduction very educational, very clear, offer the lines of understanding of the issue, and sets the terms of debate. The explanation on the job lets you specify a status, the more or less high in the hierarchy perceived or real jobs. Employment says nothing of the work, he delineates his field. The job confers a status, including those who are looking for one and have not yet found or have lost. With the exception of the islets of increasingly reduced to self-employment (agriculture, craft industry, liberal professions), out of job, there is no work.
Employment, as we know it today, is a relatively recent creation. After the suppression of the guilds and the guild system in 1791, it took more than a century and a half to build an order which includes the contract of employment in a bundle of rights and coverage of occupational risks, public employment in a status completed. The self-employment itself has not escaped this insertion in a system giving access to a minimum of social protection and pension rights. Because they confer rights as much as they define duties or constraints, the various statutes tend to include as much as exclude. The economically active population, does not hold back in its definition that the men and women who are employed, those who were officially declared to be in search of a first job or unemployed, registered at the ANPE and the Assedic. All the others are inactive ! The “housewives” are working, doing housework, shopping, cooking, but don’t have a job, since they don’t have jobs.
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