The Logics of Collective Action of Self-Employed Workers’ Associations
Growing proportion of self-employed in the workforce and new characteristics of those workers explain the setting up of associations dedicated to their promotion, defence or representation. The aim of this article is to analyze the organized collective action implemented by associations representing self-employed workers, in terms of their logics of action and new rules they help to create in the field of industrial relations. After outlining the analytical framework and research methodology, the article presents and illustrates five ideal-typical logics of action : entrepreneurial, “classical” union, “enlarged” union, professional and universal minimum standards. Each of these strategies introduces in the field of industrial relations a new problem or a new reality : self-employed for which an entity that has no legal status of employer controls significant portions of the performance of work; mobile workers contracting with several owners, even performing several occupations; professional workers who operate outside the orbit of the system that regulates recognized professions; precarious workers, falsely designated as autonomous. Each mobilizes a particular identity, which often differs from traditional identities in industrial relations. Each is at least partially aimed at transforming the institutional rules, by promoting changes in the legislation or some form of bargaining with “labour deployers.” While some argue for maintaining or strengthening existing rules, which define the self-employed as an entrepreneur, others favour the extension to certain groups of self-employed of the protection afforded to employees by labour legislation, while others promote the establishment of new rules aimed at bargaining sector-wide minimum conditions of work for independent contractors. Further research is needed to better understand the impact of these new actors and new rules on self-employed working conditions, on the traditional actors in the field of industrial relations and on the model of collective representation.