par Laurent Duclos
A mini historical review : employability, pillar of the European Employment Strategy
Following the Luxembourg summit in November 1997, individual employability became one of the main pillars of the European Employment Strategy (EES). This mutually-shared notion resurfaced recently in the wake of flexicurity. The development of employability is often considered as the best means for an individual to deal with fluctuations in employment relationships (dequalification, unemployment) by allowing him to move easily from contract to contract. Keeping in mind businesses’ need for flexibility, the simplistic version of the flexicurity model notably proposes to place "protection of the individual’s employability" before the "protection of his/her job". In other words, we could replace legislation on job protection, which impeded shifts in the job market, with programs that safeguard individual career paths. Now we just have to lay out the content of these programs! This model of flexicurity will also allow Europe to deal with job instability as a given and to concentrate more on ways to modernize its economy (cf. notably "the entrepreneurial spirit", the EES’ second historical pillar).
Is employability a has-been concept ?
Truth be told, the notion of employability is difficult to grasp. Generally speaking, we can say that integration into employment creates employability. Because it involves from the very beginning an ability to develop skills, this integration already allows the selection of the individual’s appropriate professional talents and behaviors. Conversely, programs for developing employability, notably aimed at job seekers, do not improve integration into employment except under certain conditions. Included among these conditions is the acknowledgement of a collective responsibility in the creation of skills and a clear-cut sharing of responsibilities among the actors involved (the business, the State and the individual). As soon as we free the business from being responsible for developing employability, we encourage the practice of talent poaching. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we risk loading too much on the employee. We do not disregard the fact that there is a decontextualized version of employability that makes it an individual’s personal attribute. This concept thus accords the individual exclusive responsibility for maintaining his/her own employability. To a certain extent, it makes the employee, who cannot predict his/her future, the main person responsible for his/her unemployment… Furthermore, aren’t the causes of unemployment currently being researched as one of the factors that determine labor supply, beginning obviously with the job seeker’s past and present conduct ?
Entrepreneur and employer, dissociated figures
The emergence of the notion of employability is symptomatic of this focus on labor supply. Among the determinants of labor demand, the entrepreneur’s own capacity to create and management jobs has been rarely addressed. Lawmakers have not really sought to open businesses’ "black box" and have instead simply accorded them an employer status through the incentives they have created. Whether they have sought to play with fee exemptions to their benefit or whether they have authorized resorting to job contracts that are not secure, lawmakers have accepted that the threshold of what constitutes a "normal job" be lowered.
We forget that in general, it is not a business’ basic function to create jobs. This ability only comes out once the business gets off the ground, during its operations. It is therefore the product of a specific functioning that is important to understand if we want to know how the ability to be an employer is created, perpetuated and undone. In other words, the ability to be an employer does not automatically come with being an entrepreneur, a fortiori, in a "micro-enterprise". We call this ability "employerability", and its development will certainly affect employment policy but will to a certain extent remain indifferent to the classic system of employment aid and of government intervention currently applied to the development of businesses.
The issue takes shape differently for medium and large enterprises. Here, it is externalization strategies or, more specifically, triangulation practices in employment relationships that shed doubt on the employer’s quality. The birth of what we call today the business-network thus comes across as an even more evident dissociation between the figure of the entrepreneur and of the function of the employer, which has become more auxiliary. However, above all, it is the desire to not be the direct employer of the mobilized labor force and concomitantly, the pushing of employment risk onto third parties that are in question. Supporting "employerability" in this context would above all be a way of responding to an obvious dilution of social responsibility in the business-network.
Employerability, a new European concept ?
The concept of employerability is not wholly absent from the European literature. However, it still involves increasing an employer’s marketability by offering a better environment for the employee, rather than developing a problematic skill for the entrepreneur. One thing that can be aimed for via this concept of employerability is, for example, the development of services to help small businesses. It involves not so much targeting the latter to help set it up, strictly speaking, but more precisely, targeting the functional dimension of its activity as it relates to the establishment of and administration of employment relationships. Therefore, we can assume that the goal of improving employment quality is more pertinent than increasing the volume of employment in businesses. By working on promoting mediations targeted at the function of the employer, the concept of employerability may be a useful complement to today’s analyses that are too focused on the functioning of the labor market.
Laurent Duclos
Laboratoire des Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l’Economie (IDHE)
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