What can companies bring to priority neighborhoods?

This was the title of the seventh program recommended by the "Borloo" report entitled Vivre ensemble, vivre en grand la République. Discarded in 2018 by the President of the Republic, the document was brought back into the spotlight by the riots following the death of Nahel. Faced with the economic misery of working-class neighborhoods, the issue of work is described as "the mother of all battles". It is said to be "the most blatant manifestation of inequality, the one that stands in the way of the future, that makes people lose confidence in themselves and in our Republic".

Ousama Bouiss, University of Montpellier

"It's all about business and jobs.

The fruit of a process of reflection involving local authorities, associations, businesses and many other players, the report highlights the complementary relationship between the fight against poverty, work andbusiness. What's more, it identifies the latter as the central driving force behind the metamorphosis of the lives of these "6 million inhabitants" who "live in a form of relegation, sometimes even amnesia, awakened by the occasional news item".

Employment contract, social contract

Anthony Hussenot, professor of management science at the Université Côté d'Azur, concludes his book Pourquoi travailler:

"Work is a complex activity" [...], never totally an alienated and solely remunerative activity or a totally free and emancipating activity."

He identifies five main roles that work plays in our lives.

It plays an economic role through the income we derive from it, which must enable us to meet our needs; a social role in that it "enables individuals to position themselves in society"; and an identity role, since "our ways of speaking, behaving and believing, but also to some extent our political and economic ideas, our cultural tastes, etc., are partly the result of our relations with our professional environment". It also has a legal-political role, as work is a "social contract" between the individual, the employer and the state. It seals the "promise" that, in exchange for the work provided, individuals can live decently, in particular by gaining access to the consumer society, being protected by the state and being able to hope for a better future". Finally, it fulfils a political role through which we participate in the production and reproduction of the systems in which we live.

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Just stating these roles is enough to understand why work is "the most blatant manifestation of inequality". When the salary is not enough to live on, when the social position induced by the profession is symbolically and socially devalued, then the social contract is weakened, because work does not fulfill its "promise". With unemployment rates between two and three times the average in working-class neighborhoods, it's even a form of exclusion from this social contract that's at stake.

But having a job is not enough

The solutions put forward in the Borloo report focus on two main areas: training through apprenticeships, work-study schemes and mentoring, and mobilizing companies to create jobs for people from working-class neighborhoods.

However necessary and relevant these proposals may be, they are by no means sufficient. We still need to ensure that work fulfills its role of providing everyone with a satisfactory income, in line with their individual aspirations and contributing to the reproduction of a political system in keeping with the democratic ideal. Since the enterprise contributes to the political and social integration of the citizen, simply "having a job" is not enough. It must also guarantee the possibility of a dignified life.

The preamble to the Constitution of the International Labour Organization states:

"A universal and lasting peace can only be founded on the basis of social justice."

As Alain Supiot, a specialist in labor law, points out in his book The power of an idea :

"There are working conditions that involve injustice, misery and deprivation for large numbers of people, generating such discontent that universal peace and harmony are endangered [...]. This abandonment of [social justice] leads to a vertiginous increase in inequalities, the sinking of the working classes into precariousness and downgrading, and the mass migration of young people driven by poverty. This, in turn, gives rise to protean anger and violence, fuelling the return of ethno-nationalism and xenophobia".

By putting social justice back at the heart of the debate on the role of business and work, we aim to counter the deleterious effects of neoliberalism, which contributes to the isolation of individuals. In the face of discourses that promote the ideal of individual success based on the accumulation of material wealth or symbolic domination, the democratic ideal of social justice calls for solidarity as a necessary condition of freedom and equality.

The tools are available

Consequently, democratizing the company means not only encouraging dialogue but, more importantly, subordinating the criterion of performance to the criterion of justice. In the same way, democratizing work does not simply mean "creating jobs". It also means, in the words of the Declaration of Philadelphia, which in 1944 defined the aims and objectives of the International Labour Organization, promoting "the employment of workers in occupations in which they will have the satisfaction of giving the fullest measure of their skill and knowledge, and of making the best possible contribution to the common welfare".

By approaching the question of work and enterprise through the prism of the fight against poverty and the affirmation of democratic principles, we are invited to revise our ways of thinking. Working-class neighborhoods hold up a precious mirror to the limits and dangers of our economic system. It is no longer a question of placing society at the service of business, but rather of placing business at the service of society. From a normative point of view, it's a question of actualizing democratic principles and values in all places, especially those where we spend most of our time, such as companies.

In fact, as the Borloo report states, "we are capable of dealing with most of these problems". Indeed, research into democratic organizational models, reflections on the relationship between the ecological transition and new professions, and proposals for labor law reform are all at our disposal. However, to take advantage of them, to experiment and implement these solutions, we must first leave behind "the anxieties of our history, the accumulated, piled-up, sedimented, ineffective, contradictory, scattered and abandoned systems where the announcement of spectacular figures takes the place of policy".

Ousama Bouiss, PhD student in strategy and organization theory, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.