You are Economist in the OECD Team of BNP Paribas group and in this audiobrief you are going to talk about Self-employment. How would you define self-employment? And How would you describe it in France?
Self-employed, or non-salaried people are people who work but who are paid in a form other than salary. Salaried employees are people who work, under a contract, for another resident entity in exchange for a salary or equivalent remuneration, with a hierarchical relationship.
In the past, a self-employed person could be essentially a craftsman, farmer, trader or lawyer. That was essentially someone who is his own boss.
In the late forties, when Insee statistics began, these self-employed accounted for almost one in three jobs. Their place was therefore central. And in the half-century that followed, it fell rather inexorably. With the sharp fall in the number of farmers and the rural exodus that accompanied it, as well as the transformation of retail and wholesale trade and, in particular, the development of large-scale distribution. As a result, the children of the self-employed joined the ranks of wage-earners throughout the post-World War II period and then again in the seventies, eighties and nineties.
In almost fifty years, the number of self-employed jobs has been divided by three. And it is at this point, that the momentum was reversed and that this status that was thought to be obsolete invested new areas.
From its low point in mid-2001, at 1.7 million people, non-farm self-employment has grown markedly, recently reaching the 3 million mark, representing currently almost one in nine jobs.
Why do you say that we are currently living in age II of self-employment?
?Precisely because of this rebound, which was not easy to anticipate after the 1990s, when crises hit two of the main pillars of self-employment: agriculture and the construction industry. It was then that economic policy acted to reverse the trend, with tax cuts, which became later tax credits, which have led households to use service providers for homework, ranging from childcare to gardening.
Over time, the self-employed also increasingly entered the enterprise, with the increasing servicisation of innovation and investment more broadly. Business transformation thus went hand in hand with outsourcing and fueled the tremendous development of business services, where one in five jobs created in 20 years took the form of self-employment.
Finally, self-employment also picked up where it had previously fallen: in crafts and trade, as well as in transport. In the building sector, the growing importance of maintenance and renovation is striking. And in a sector that is constructing less and less new buildings and is maintaining more and more of the old one, the craft sector has its place, particularly in energy renovation work. In parallel, the development of uberisation, which links end-users and service providers through platforms, has also supported the development of self-employment.
How do you interpret these developments?
First, the development of self-employment is structural. What has led to the renewal of self-employment, as tax incentives or societal transformations, still holds. We have in fact entered the world of coexistence for some years now. People of different status work together in our companies.
The labor market has evolved and, as a result, the bridges between salaried employment and self-employment have developed: the employee has gained autonomy and flexibility, in particular through teleworking, while the self-employed is gaining in formalisation and security, in particular through umbrella companies (a system whereby the self-employed signs an employment contract with an umbrella company, which signs a commercial contract with the client company).
Another sign of these growing similarities is that working time, which has historically been higher for the self-employed, is now converging between employees and self-employed, and the latter have more access to part-time work than in the past.
In conclusion, it is striking to note the profound changes in the labor market in recent years. These changes are expected to continue in the context of a dynamic French labor market: overall, the employment rate has never been so high since the statistical series began, at 68.8% of 15-64 year olds in the first quarter of 2024.
Thank you Stephane for your explanation. Thank you to our listeners and visit our website, where you will find analyses from our economic research team throughout the year.
See you soon.
