Is Negotiated Public Action, a Performative Way to COPE with Older Workers’ Integration to Labour Market in France ?

In the French industrial relations system the State is playing a central role. In the recent years, governments tried to conduct their employment policy toward older workers through framing multi-industry bargaining and imposing mandatory bargaining at enterprise level. This policy is called by IR specialists, “negotiated public action”. Two devices were successively used: bargaining on seniors and bargaining on generation contract. The first, which imposed demographic indicators on seniors recruitment or maintaining seniors in employment, was successful in number of agreements but these agreements were not very innovative. The second which aims to connect recruiting a young worker and maintaining or recruiting an older one, is less successful at enterprise level although a multi-industry agreement and some industry agreements tried to impulse a dynamic process.

By analyzing Generation contract agreements and seniors agreements and their bargaining processes, at multi-industry and industry level, the aim of our proposal is to point out how bargaining actors integrate governments constraints in their own strategies and use it as resources. Through this analyze, we could also demonstrate how actors articulate their own objectives, sometimes different from government ones like maintaining trade off in redundancy plans and lean on previous bargaining rounds on apprenticeship for example. Finally, our question is to see how actors’ autonomy cope with older workers integration to labour market (at different levels).