A Belgian version of the story

Back to Belgium. For its system our country has taken its inspiration from France whilst adopting a different approach. ‘The programme Act of 2000 did not aim at framing existing practices but instead to respond to the lobbying carried out by different actors, who wanted a new exception to the ban on making workers available. The first exception to the regulation forbidding the supply of workers was that of temporary work. The EAs were the second example,’ explains Virginie Xhauflair.

In fact the Belgian legal framework has proven to be relatively restrictive. In effect the legal legislation concerning EAs makes provision for ‘a system which organises the placing of workers who are difficult to find work for at the disposal of users with a view to their reinsertion in the labour market.’ ‘This restriction explains why in 2012 Belgium only has 3 EAs, involving some forty business companies and around twenty workers,’ she observes.

Before reaching this (small) result the road was nevertheless long and littered with pitfalls. The story of the anthropologist’s and her personal investment in the setting up of one of the Belgian EAs bears witness to it. But it also brings to light the possible strengths of this formula, as well as the difficulties connected to their development and their valorisation.

A history under construction 

Created 25 years ago by François Pichault, ‘Lentic (le Laboratoire d'étude sur les nouvelles technologies, l'innovation et le changement, (the Laboratory for the Study of ICT, Innovation and Change) at the University of Liège) took an interest in the new information technologies, then in the Information and Communications Technologies. Pretty logically it subsequently looked into the business networks and new forms of organisation, often externalised, which were then emerging and which for example included telecommuting and the development of objective based human resources, a practice which led workers to be managed as self employed workers,’ Virginie Xhauflair reminds us.

Following its research, in 2005, the LENTIC team made a worrying observation: ‘It seemed to us that, faced with the deregulation of the job market, our practices of social dialogue and protecting workers’ rights were less and less adapted. In effect, protecting workers in the way it was done previously was becoming more difficult. Now this protection is concentrated more on that of privileged or strategic workers, those who have an important value for core-business. On the other hand those who find themselves on the periphery risk being affected by precarious statuses, or externalised by sub-contracting or rehired as self-employed workers,’ she continues.

Following on from this observation, the LENTIC team then became interested in the possible emergence of new forms of work regulation, within different organisational borders. Thus, for example, relates Virginie Xhauflair, ‘for the Brussels-Cologne high speed train line it was necessary to build a tunnel over 6km in length: several Belgian, French, German and Dutch civil engineering businesses were linked together in a network to achieve the job. A work collective was able to be created without taking into account legal borders, with an on-site social dialogue, adapted to the particular needs of the workers on the construction site. This experiment proved that an evolution of the practices of social dialogue was possible.’