The Diversification of Teachers’ Employment Relations. Comparing Local Patterns Beyond Employment Regimes in England and France.

Dumay, Xavier [UCL] et al.

Precarious jobs are typically described as jobs lacking security in one or several dimensions: job duration, income and advancement prospects, protection by labour laws, collective bargaining arrangements and welfare state benefits (Hipp et al. 2015). These characteristics are frequently found in what are known as non-standard employment relations. Although permanent, full-time employment can also be associated with low wages and poor job security (Bernhardt and Krause 2014), nonstandard employment has been a central concern of the literature, with many works focusing on fixed-term/short term contracts. Similarly, precariousness and flexibilisation have usually been associated with external rather than ‘internal’ flexibility in organisations. These observations invite us to rethink categories and dichotomies (standard/non-standard jobs, job security/insecurity, conventional/non-conventional employment, paid/unpaid work), taking account of shifting boundaries between forms of employment relations and the rise in short term jobs, but also the heterogeneity within standard work. This session aims at providing insights on contemporary forms of precarity across categorial differences, looking at changes outside as well as within standard forms of employment. We want to emphasise that precarious work is not tied to a specific form of employment, but it encompasses what falls below socially accepted normative standards by which workers have certain rights and protection (Kalleberg 2018). The session will bring to the fore the ongoing diversification of employment relations and the continuum of precarious situations, considering cross-national differences in prevailing norms (standard, secure, flexible) and in normative systems (Barbier 2005) and their interplay with policies, regulation and other contextual factors, among which organisational and inter-organisational factors (Pulignano and Keune 2015). The session aims at focusing on three interrelated areas of interest: Contracts. We are lacking detailed analysis of contractual arrangements and their transformations. We want to emphasise the differences among types of employment contracts, going beyond the boundary between standard and non-standard employment relations. This questions processes of contractualisation, how what is and what is not comprised in the contract is negotiated and experienced by the multiple parties of the employment relationship, differing in their relative power, embedded into larger social institutions (welfare protections, industrial relations, legal systems, education, family), but also engaged into the definition and implementation of labour market rules (Supiot 2003). This implies to consider subjective sides of flexibility, insecurity and precariousness. Heterogeneity within standard employment conditions. The session will address reductions in social and statutory protections in what otherwise might be considered standard employment relations, especially in formally regulated sectors, both within and between countries. This entails going beyond the dualisation hypothesis and the difference between transactional and relational employment relations, to further the discussion on the erosion of standard employment and pervasive forms of precarity. Methodological and conceptual challenges in comparing the transformation of contractual relations, and more broadly comparative perspectives on employment relations and precarious work, encompassing questions related to the historicity and the contextualisation of analytical categories. Which concepts are most heuristic to grasp differences in contractual arrangements across countries, and compare precarious work and flexibilisation of employment relationships meaningfully?