The French food‐processing model: High relative wages and high work intensity

Abstract

International audienceThe authors examine wages and working conditions in meat processing and confectionery in France. Working there may not require much skill, or command good wages and working conditions, but this article reveals a more complex, positive situation than expected, thanks to the "French model's" national minimum wage and the extension of collective wage agreements to all workers in the sector. But pressures to lower labour costs are still felt, and the firms examined must meet pressures to increase productivity, flexibility and automation. Moreover, retail chains also seek to lower prices and impose just-in-time production

Working Still Harder

“…Increased affluence in the latter half of the century was accompanied in most countries by rising real wages for many workers, for long periods of time; and yet this growth coincided with significant periods of declining job quality in the form of work intensification. Work intensification has been recorded, inter alia, among managers (Hassard, McCann, and Morris 2011), nurses (Ackroyd and Bolton 1999;Adams et al 2000;Zeytinoglu et al 2007), government service workers (Carter et al 2013), automobile and aerospace workers (Stewart, Danford, Richardson, and Pulignano 2010), apparel industry workers (Taplin 1995), meat processing and confectionery industry workers (Caroli, Gautie, and Lamanthe 2009), school teachers (John 2008;Wotherspoon 2008;Beck 2017;Braun 2017), university lecturers (Ogbonna and Harris 2004), domestic workers (Hopkins 2017), IT workers (Kelly and Moen 2020), and care workers (Cooke and Bartram 2015). Periods of work intensification across whole nations are also widely reported: in the United States between 1997 and 2006 (Maume and Purcell 2007;Kalleberg 2011); in Britain in the early 1990s (and likely before) and then again in the mid-2000s (Green 2001(Green , 2006Burchell 2006;Green and Whitfield 2009;CIPD 2013); in France from the mid-1980s until 1998 (Gollac and Volkoff 1996;Valeyre 2004); in New Zealand and Australia in the 1990s (Morehead et al 1997;Allan, Brosnan, and Walsh 1999);in Ireland between 2003(Russell and McGinnity 2014and in Finland from 1977to 1997(Mustosmäki, Oinas, and Anttila 2017.…”

Impacts et services issus des élevages européens

“…Les conditions de travail dans les industries agroalimentaires, en particulier dans les abattoirs, sont abordées dans la bibliographie scientifique européenne et inter nationale (Caroli et al, 2009 Depuis le rapport « Livestock's long shadow » publié par la FAO en 2006, la littérature scientifique a construit un diagnostic chiffré sur l'emprise environnementale de l'élevage à l'échelle de la planète.…”