How politics is taking over the freelance movement ?
What will the world of work look like tomorrow? The labor market is undergoing a transformation, and it is not the 830000 registered freelancers who will say the opposite.
While France had 90% of salaried employees in the 2000s, today 20% to 30% of workers are independent; no offense to Ford and its Scientific Organization of Work that had pushed things in favor of wage labor. Today, France would be a “nation of freelancing” in the making, according to Gaël Clouzard for Influencia.
Indeed, highly skilled workers, which are consultants, designers, or developers, let themselves tempted by the freelance adventure. Being a freelancer is an assumed choice, and the distorted image of the precarious status of the individual fighting for his business disappears. Why? Because the stability of the permanent contract and the benefits of the Works Council are no longer a match for the freedom of working conditions and the abandonment of subordination. And that, the government has understood it well.
The government as the insurer of the current transition
Created in 2008, the auto-entrepreneur status had already seduced many adventurers who, thanks to a very simple recipe, passed the milestone. But it was not the only incentive: Generation Y let itself be convinced for several years by the étudiant-entrepreneur status, put in place in 2013. The whole range of benefits, supported by the government itself, allows student to have a foot in the jungle of freelance.
But today, the government wants to go even further. Emmanuel Macron had promised: he wants to develop, promote, and facilitate self-employment. The president had already taken the measure of the transformation of the labor market even before his investiture.
People have “the Right to take risks”, he said during his campaign. And bad mouths have to refrain from talking because the President is on track to enforce the measures he wants for the fashionable labor market: ceiling increase, project contract, removal of the RSI, right to unemployment for freelance etc.
The French government is becoming a major actor in the current transformation: push the younger generations and attract the older ones.
Who really wins?
Freelance nibbling more and more the market. Besides, 47% of companies think they will hire only freelancers in the future. And we understand better why when we know that, thanks to this, the company is in the certainty of engaging an expertise more than an individual, for 30% cheaper than a conventional employee.
The project contract is also the best illustration, as companies can opt for a one-off commitment, without worrying about contractual wage obligations. In consulting firms, heart of agility and optimization of the payroll, they can take one by one freelancers depending on the missions. A kind of win-win contract where everyone finds value.
What will happen the day these freelancers, taken one by one, get together and form a more powerful team of skills, whose costs will compete much more than those of the firms?
Freelancing is not about getting the comfortable situation that every employee would dream to have, freelancing is about breaking the usual path of what companies have to offer. It’s about reinventing the whole game, not just some of the old rules.
Marie-Anne Gentet & Diane Gosset
