Timoté Hebert

Bio

Thesis in progress: The structure and evolution of employee representation in the cleaning sector since the Act of 20 August 2008 ‘on the renewal of social democracy’

The Act of 20 August 2008 “on the renewal of social democracy” brought about significant changes to workplace elections. Previously strictly limited to internal company matters, staff representative elections now also determine trade unions’ access to and influence in collective bargaining.

This thesis seeks to analyse the impact of the reform’s implementation and employees’ adaptation to it on the results of workplace elections, and consequently on the profile of representatives and the nature of the representative relationship. It starts from the premise that the definition of the influence and role played by mechanisms designed to measure trade union representativeness has a significant impact on the configuration of industrial relations as a whole in a sector such as the cleaning industry. For this reason, the analysis does not focus on workplace elections as a specific subject, but rather treats them as a lens through which to analyse changes in relations between social actors within the sector.

We are therefore interested in the specific structure of representation within a sector comprising a significant number of employees (404,000 people in 2015 (INSEE)), in the way in which the workers within it have responded to reforms affecting representativeness and the electoral process since 2008 (changes to representativeness rules (2008), mandatory gender parity on electoral lists (2015), merger of representative bodies (2017)), and to the (in some cases significant) changes in trade union representation at both company and sectoral levels.