Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

WORKING IN FRANCE

French ‘gig economy’ workers to elect union reps for the first time

Elections are being held among around 120,000 employees of 'gig economy' firms such as Uber and Deliveroo in France to allow them to choose union representatives - one of the rights that they now have after being declared as employees by French courts.

Published: 9 May 2022 11:33 CEST
French 'gig economy' workers to elect union reps for the first time
Photo by JACQUES DEMARTHON / AFP

Multi-national platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo based their business modelling on saying that all their staff were ‘self-employed’ workers, however a series of court cases in France concluded that the staff are actually employees – making them entitled to benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay and union representation.

Polls will be held on Tuesday among 84,000 delivery drivers (for platforms such as Deliveroo) and 39,000 VTC drivers (for platforms like Uber) to pick their staff representation.

Among the names on the ballot are some of France’s biggest unions such as FO, CGT and Unsa, but also smaller employee representative groups such as the national federations for freelancers and small businesses.

Once the staff have picked the groups that will represent them, negotiations between unions and employers will begin over issues such as minimum pay, working conditions, rest periods and the right to ‘disconnect’.

It is expected that the talks will begin in September. 

Any employees that are elected as official delegates for a union or other organisation with more than five percent of the ballots cast are protected by French law – they cannot be sacked or disciplined for their union activities and they must also be compensated for time spent on union activities.

Anyone who is an employee in France is covered by basic legal rights that protect things like the right to paid holiday, paid sick leave, maternity or paternity leave and medical cover. 

However around 90 percent of workers are also covered by a convention collective – which are agreements worked out over the years between unions/staff representatives and bosses to give extra rights or perks.

Sometimes these agreements cover only one company and sometimes they cover an entire sector, such as journalists or healthcare workers.

READ ALSO The perks and benefits that French employees enjoy

Conventions collectives vary according to the sector and workplace but they can include things like extra maternity or paternity leave days, tax breaks, extra allowances for travel or meals or an agreement that the employer will pay 100 percent of the employee’s mutuelle health cover (as opposed to the 50 percent mandated in law).

If you are covered by a convention collective, it will be listed on your payslip. You can then look up the agreement online and see what you might be entitled to.

READ ALSO How to understand your French payslip

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

BUSINESS

French barber still trimming at 90

French barber Roger Amilhastre could have hung up his clippers decades ago but he said his passion for the business gives him a reason to get up in the morning.

Published: 26 April 2024 15:01 CEST
French barber still trimming at 90

“I love this job, it’s in my bones,” the 90 year old said, leaning on one of his cast-iron barber’s chairs from the 1940s.

“And despite my age, my hands still don’t shake.”

Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

“I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home,” he said, which cost more than €2,000 a month.

Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to stave off sad thoughts.

“I’m not grumpy getting up [to go to work],” he said.

France’s national hairdressers’ union believes Amilhastre may be the country’s oldest active barber.

“We have a few who continue late in life, but 90 years old is exceptional,” union president Christophe Dore told AFP.

“I’m not sure if he is France’s oldest barber, but if not, he can’t be far off.”

According to national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.

In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds. But statistics do not go beyond that age.

Many of Amilhastre’s customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber’s shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.

The shop witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II.

“During the war, German police came to find my father to groom a captain who had broken his leg,” Amilhastre said.

German troops had taken over a large stately home in town called Beauregard.

“We were scared because they used to say that anyone who went up to Beauregard never came back,” he said. “Luckily, he did.”

He said he remembered a “tough period” for businesses when he first picked up the scissors in 1947.

But then the town rebounded, he said, with its men following a flurry of new hair trends from greased quiffs in the 1950s, to 1970s bowl cuts.

The barber’s shop survived an economic downturn as local paper mills closed in the 1980s sparking mass layoffs, and supermarkets pushed small shops out of business.

“People started looking for work further afield, so we had to adapt and stay open later in the evening,” Amilhastre said.

That same decade, the Aids epidemic worried customers, who understood little about the illness at the time.

“People were scared,” Amilhastre said. “They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there’d be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer.” 

Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs the nearby cafe where Amilhastre once taught him to play billiards as a young boy.

Behind his bar, Surre said he remembered his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.

“He’d pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne – you know, squeezing those little pumps,” he said.

He is one of several older customers to regularly drop by Achille’s – even just to read the newspaper or have a chat.

Inside the barber’s, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut. “With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship,” he said.

SHOW COMMENTS