Work, employment, employment. Many people take these words as synonyms.
However, this is not the case and it is important to understand in order
to analyze things. ---- There are many definitions of the word labor,
which originally referred to childbirth. If we take its most general
meaning, work is a human activity requiring sustained effort, which aims
to modify natural elements, to create and/or produce new things, new
ideas (cnrtl dictionary). We see that there is no notion of remuneration
here. And besides, if we follow the I.N.S.E.E. in its attempts at
estimation, the time devoted to domestic production over a year in
France represents one or two times the paid working time. This means
that the vast majority of time worked is unpaid. This work remained
socially invisible until feminist movements denounced the double working
day.
When paid, work becomes a job. If your mother-in-law takes care of
picking up your children from school every day, it's work. If you don't
have a mother-in-law available and you have to find a nanny, it's still
work, but it's a job. This is why all estimates of wealth in our
societies are false. When it is your mother-in-law who does it, we
consider that there is no creation of wealth. On the other hand, if it
is a nanny, there is a production of service recorded, because there is
circulation of money.
Question: is undeclared work, which is indeed paid work, a job? The
answer is not clear-cut among economists. For statisticians, rather no,
because not being declared, they cannot count it. For economists, rather
yes, because it is indeed paid work. It must be understood that
undeclared work only exists as the opposite of declared work, only
because there is a legal obligation to declare. This obligation is
explained for two reasons. The first is taxes. If a State wants to
collect taxes on the income of the population, remuneration must be
declared. The second is the labor code and social laws: declared work
gives rise to collective rights: social security, retirement, etc. But
economically, whether paid work is declared or not, it functions well as
a job. The distinction between declared employment and clandestine
employment is due to the state of the legislation.
Formal, informal and salaried work
The question also arises for illegal paid work. Initially, we considered
that these were not jobs. Stealing may require sustained effort, but
only moves wealth around without creating anything new. But hey, we
could perhaps ask the question about certain declared jobs too... In the
end, certain activities are legal in certain countries, and illegal in
others. The most emblematic are prostitution and the manufacture and
trade of drugs, which correspond well to the creation of new products.
Problem is, if we want to compare the GDP of these countries, then, in
fact, we are not comparing the same thing. After numerous international
congresses, statisticians decided to integrate prostitution and the
production and trade of alcohol (banned in some countries as a drug) and
certain drugs, at least in the European Union. But there, by definition
we will consider undeclared paid work as employment.
Don't you have a headache yet? So, let's continue.
A job is paid work, but it is not necessarily paid employment. Work was
paid in one form or another before the invention of capitalism. Salaried
employment is a contract (explicit or not) of submission (this is the
legal term). The employee is not the owner of the product of his work,
he cannot sell it, he carries out his work under conditions over which
he is not in control (schedules, technique used, materials used) and he
must obey the orders of his employer (within the limits of his place of
work). Marx expressed this more simply than the law by saying that he
rented his labor power.
The labor movement has obtained social conquests, and therefore wage
employment is accompanied by collective rights (social protection,
regulation of layoffs, salary management, safety at work, etc.). Hence
all the lawsuits to reclassify jobs or work as salaried jobs, in order
to obtain the related rights. And the pressure from employers so that
there are more and more non-salaried jobs. And this is where we see that
these distinctions are not so obvious, and that in particular it is not
because it is marked "independent" on a piece of paper that we are.
But hey, so far, we can consider that all this is simple. Yes, yes... If
we go back to basics, the work can be paid or not. Paid is a job. This
job can be salaried or not.
Where it gets complicated is when we want to draw boundaries. For
example, the bulk of hidden work in France is probably employees who
work more than the indicated hours, either for free (so there, it is a
mixture of employment and volunteering), or with unpaid overtime.
declared but compensated by bonuses (there, it is a mixture of declared
work and undeclared work). Another example, many "self-employed" jobs
actually correspond to salaried work.
Work and non-work
There is another boundary which is increasingly difficult to draw, it is
the one which separates what economists call inactivity from what they
call activity. For an economist, an active person is someone who has a
job or is looking for one. An unemployed person is therefore an active
person. On the other hand, a student who prepares for a competitive exam
and works 20 hours a day is inactive, as is a stay-at-home mother
raising 8 children. If I fall asleep peacefully while my students sweat
over their test, I am working, but they are not. So far, the boundaries
are clear. But an apprentice or a trainee? On the one hand, as a person
in the process of training, he is inactive. But when he is in business,
he works on behalf of his boss. In the statistics, the apprentice is
counted as an employee, and the trainee as inactive. But we will agree
that the border is fragile.
Now let's come to volunteering. The government definition is ridiculous.
After specifying that there is no legal definition, this is what they
write: "A volunteer is any person who freely commits to carrying out
non-salaried action for the benefit of others, outside of their
professional time and family" Well yes, we should still remember that
most of the work in France is unpaid, so we are going to exclude women's
domestic work from voluntary work. "Volunteering" counts in the training
course. It always looks good on a CV, especially if you have learned to
break it down into skills. Unless you volunteer for support for
Palestine for example. A volunteer is free and has no contract. He
respects the statutes of the association for which he volunteers of
course. He can leave whenever he wants, etc.
It should be noted that a volunteer for the Olympic Games must respect
schedules, does not choose what he or she will do, and undertakes not to
leave in the middle. And he signs a paper with his mission. We are
beginning to dangerously move away from the freedom of volunteering
towards the submission of wage labor. But without salary...
Never short of innovations, our administration also invented
volunteering. A volunteer is a volunteer with a contract, a mission, and
compensation which is not a salary (111.45 euros net minimum in France)
(1). We can call it an internship, except that there is no diploma at
the end nor any agreement with a school. We can also call it an
employment contract without the advantages of employment. It is also
explicitly stated that the labor code does not apply.
In fact, the boundaries between work and non-work, between employment
and non-employment, have never been clear. Salary employment was
gradually codified according to social conquests. It has become a form
of employment that includes a dimension of collective rights. As a
result, employers continue to invent forms that allow them to escape the
legal classification of employment while fundamentally being employment
if we define it as the constraint to work for a boss. And every
opportunity is good to invent exceptions. Like for example the Olympic
Games.
Sylvie
(1) What is the difference between compensation and salary? Very simple,
the compensation gives you no right, neither to retirement, nor to
social security, nor to unemployment...
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4205
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
However, this is not the case and it is important to understand in order
to analyze things. ---- There are many definitions of the word labor,
which originally referred to childbirth. If we take its most general
meaning, work is a human activity requiring sustained effort, which aims
to modify natural elements, to create and/or produce new things, new
ideas (cnrtl dictionary). We see that there is no notion of remuneration
here. And besides, if we follow the I.N.S.E.E. in its attempts at
estimation, the time devoted to domestic production over a year in
France represents one or two times the paid working time. This means
that the vast majority of time worked is unpaid. This work remained
socially invisible until feminist movements denounced the double working
day.
When paid, work becomes a job. If your mother-in-law takes care of
picking up your children from school every day, it's work. If you don't
have a mother-in-law available and you have to find a nanny, it's still
work, but it's a job. This is why all estimates of wealth in our
societies are false. When it is your mother-in-law who does it, we
consider that there is no creation of wealth. On the other hand, if it
is a nanny, there is a production of service recorded, because there is
circulation of money.
Question: is undeclared work, which is indeed paid work, a job? The
answer is not clear-cut among economists. For statisticians, rather no,
because not being declared, they cannot count it. For economists, rather
yes, because it is indeed paid work. It must be understood that
undeclared work only exists as the opposite of declared work, only
because there is a legal obligation to declare. This obligation is
explained for two reasons. The first is taxes. If a State wants to
collect taxes on the income of the population, remuneration must be
declared. The second is the labor code and social laws: declared work
gives rise to collective rights: social security, retirement, etc. But
economically, whether paid work is declared or not, it functions well as
a job. The distinction between declared employment and clandestine
employment is due to the state of the legislation.
Formal, informal and salaried work
The question also arises for illegal paid work. Initially, we considered
that these were not jobs. Stealing may require sustained effort, but
only moves wealth around without creating anything new. But hey, we
could perhaps ask the question about certain declared jobs too... In the
end, certain activities are legal in certain countries, and illegal in
others. The most emblematic are prostitution and the manufacture and
trade of drugs, which correspond well to the creation of new products.
Problem is, if we want to compare the GDP of these countries, then, in
fact, we are not comparing the same thing. After numerous international
congresses, statisticians decided to integrate prostitution and the
production and trade of alcohol (banned in some countries as a drug) and
certain drugs, at least in the European Union. But there, by definition
we will consider undeclared paid work as employment.
Don't you have a headache yet? So, let's continue.
A job is paid work, but it is not necessarily paid employment. Work was
paid in one form or another before the invention of capitalism. Salaried
employment is a contract (explicit or not) of submission (this is the
legal term). The employee is not the owner of the product of his work,
he cannot sell it, he carries out his work under conditions over which
he is not in control (schedules, technique used, materials used) and he
must obey the orders of his employer (within the limits of his place of
work). Marx expressed this more simply than the law by saying that he
rented his labor power.
The labor movement has obtained social conquests, and therefore wage
employment is accompanied by collective rights (social protection,
regulation of layoffs, salary management, safety at work, etc.). Hence
all the lawsuits to reclassify jobs or work as salaried jobs, in order
to obtain the related rights. And the pressure from employers so that
there are more and more non-salaried jobs. And this is where we see that
these distinctions are not so obvious, and that in particular it is not
because it is marked "independent" on a piece of paper that we are.
But hey, so far, we can consider that all this is simple. Yes, yes... If
we go back to basics, the work can be paid or not. Paid is a job. This
job can be salaried or not.
Where it gets complicated is when we want to draw boundaries. For
example, the bulk of hidden work in France is probably employees who
work more than the indicated hours, either for free (so there, it is a
mixture of employment and volunteering), or with unpaid overtime.
declared but compensated by bonuses (there, it is a mixture of declared
work and undeclared work). Another example, many "self-employed" jobs
actually correspond to salaried work.
Work and non-work
There is another boundary which is increasingly difficult to draw, it is
the one which separates what economists call inactivity from what they
call activity. For an economist, an active person is someone who has a
job or is looking for one. An unemployed person is therefore an active
person. On the other hand, a student who prepares for a competitive exam
and works 20 hours a day is inactive, as is a stay-at-home mother
raising 8 children. If I fall asleep peacefully while my students sweat
over their test, I am working, but they are not. So far, the boundaries
are clear. But an apprentice or a trainee? On the one hand, as a person
in the process of training, he is inactive. But when he is in business,
he works on behalf of his boss. In the statistics, the apprentice is
counted as an employee, and the trainee as inactive. But we will agree
that the border is fragile.
Now let's come to volunteering. The government definition is ridiculous.
After specifying that there is no legal definition, this is what they
write: "A volunteer is any person who freely commits to carrying out
non-salaried action for the benefit of others, outside of their
professional time and family" Well yes, we should still remember that
most of the work in France is unpaid, so we are going to exclude women's
domestic work from voluntary work. "Volunteering" counts in the training
course. It always looks good on a CV, especially if you have learned to
break it down into skills. Unless you volunteer for support for
Palestine for example. A volunteer is free and has no contract. He
respects the statutes of the association for which he volunteers of
course. He can leave whenever he wants, etc.
It should be noted that a volunteer for the Olympic Games must respect
schedules, does not choose what he or she will do, and undertakes not to
leave in the middle. And he signs a paper with his mission. We are
beginning to dangerously move away from the freedom of volunteering
towards the submission of wage labor. But without salary...
Never short of innovations, our administration also invented
volunteering. A volunteer is a volunteer with a contract, a mission, and
compensation which is not a salary (111.45 euros net minimum in France)
(1). We can call it an internship, except that there is no diploma at
the end nor any agreement with a school. We can also call it an
employment contract without the advantages of employment. It is also
explicitly stated that the labor code does not apply.
In fact, the boundaries between work and non-work, between employment
and non-employment, have never been clear. Salary employment was
gradually codified according to social conquests. It has become a form
of employment that includes a dimension of collective rights. As a
result, employers continue to invent forms that allow them to escape the
legal classification of employment while fundamentally being employment
if we define it as the constraint to work for a boss. And every
opportunity is good to invent exceptions. Like for example the Olympic
Games.
Sylvie
(1) What is the difference between compensation and salary? Very simple,
the compensation gives you no right, neither to retirement, nor to
social security, nor to unemployment...
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4205
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten