Cleaning time, protest time: employment and working conditions for hotel maids¹

Abstract

It is now admitted that part-time work emphasizes the inequalities between the sexes in both spheres of work and family, but this article rather focuses on the cleavages among women themselves. An analysis is provided of how working time and the company's position combine so as to produce inequalities among female wage-earners, assigning them heterogeneous statuses, thus exposing some of them to precarious employment, working and living conditions. The study concentrates on chambermaids working part-time and full-time in the French subcontracting context of cleaning companies. Part-time work stresses and confirms the differentiations produced by subcontracting and worsens the inequalities within this group of female workers who yet do the same tasks. These cleavages have set off strikes, and the analysis of this labor dispute sheds light on some social relations running through the firm, as well as the invisible concerns for the employment and work of these women working behind the scenes.

Introduction

Working time is a particularly useful tool in the analysis of the different kinds of social logics underlying current restructuring of the work world. Specifically, the issue of working time is fundamental to understand how the difference between the sexes is constructed in both the company and the family sphere (Silvera, 1998). Part-time work is a type of employment bringing to the fore with particular clarity the mechanisms that give the job market its hierarchical structure between men and women, of course, but also among women workers themselves.

Claiming to be responding to a “social demand” coming from women, the French public authorities in the beginning of the 80s, developed policies in favor of part-time work. At the time, this type of work was a specifically female means of resolving the employment crisis (Maruani and Nicole, 1989). Since then, part-time work has developed continuously, and in the following decade most of the jobs created were part-time jobs². From 1985 to 1995, while the number of jobs held by men remained relatively stable, 88.5% of the new jobs created were part-time jobs that came to be occupied by women (Husson, 1998). Through an individualization of the employee–employer relations it emphasizes, this form of employment in which women make up 80% of the workforce³, is a major conveyor of job and worker stratification; it also helps produce extremely precarious working situations (Jenson, 1995; Gauvin and Silvera, 1998; Alonzo, 2000; Angeloff, 2000). Working time thus contributes to segment the labor market in numerous spaces, the most vulnerable of which are predominantly occupied by women. The notion of segmentation, borrowed from the dualism theory which developed in the 70s (Doeringer and Piore, 1971)⁴, must be understood in its etymological meaning, i.e. as a process of differentiation. It is not my aim to show that working time segments the market into “primary personnel” and “secondary personnel” but rather that it plays a role in a process of employees' differentiation taking various forms and in constant recomposition. The social gaps caused by part-time work should be thought of as shifting inequalities that only make sense if one takes into account employees' socio-occupational characteristics and the way a company manages its workforce.

This article focuses on employment and working conditions of women working either part-time or full-time in a specific market area, the cleaning sector, and in the context of a specific division of labor: subcontracting.

The relevant question is thus the following: through what process and to what extent do working time and the status of a company play a role in the hierarchical organization among both workers and jobs, and what does this social stratification mean to employees? The article also seeks to understand how the deregulations brought about by part-time work and by subcontracting overlap and cumulate.

The hypothesis here, based on studies of temporary work in the 70s and 80s (Pialoux, 1979; Germe, 1981; Michon and Ramaux, 1992), is that companies seeking labor flexibility are moved to manage working time in different ways. A company's position as a principal or subcontractor, and working time combine to create inequalities among employees, assigning them heterogeneous status, thus exposing some of them to precarious employment, working and living conditions.

Although the provisions of the collective agreements governing the work of employees in subcontractor companies are often less favorable than those governing principal companies, subcontracting is not always synonymous with precarious employment (Freyssenet, 1981; Germe, 1981). Likewise, not all forms of part-time work are discriminating.

Part-time workers⁵ do not constitute a homogenous social group (Bué, 2002) (see Appendix A, Appendix B). According to the 1998 “Conditions de travail” [Working conditions] survey, completing the employment survey of the same year, 41% of part-time employees are underemployed in the ILO sense of the term⁶. This is the category of employee that interests us here, in the cleaning sector which draws its labor force from the most vulnerable segments of the labor market (women, young people, immigrants) (Bernstein, 1985) and where working conditions are particularly difficult. The organization and management of employment in this highly competitive sector are based on a quest for maximum flexibility in terms of variation in both employees' working schedule and wages, as well as on external flexibility, caused among others, by outsourcing. The increasing use of subcontracting is aimed at increasing the competitiveness of companies by compressing production costs to a minimum. This division of labor between principal and subcontractor companies has given rise to new modes of employment management. Flexibility and differentiated employment management are at the core of subcontracting relations and are working to transform employer–employee relations (Morin, 1997). Through an empirical study of hotel maids by way of interviews (Textbox 1), and following an overview of the working conditions in the cleaning sector, an analysis is made of the working conditions of some cleaning workers and the ways they have access to jobs. It allows for explaining the process by which social cleavages evolved in companies.

We look into the way working time hierarchically orders not just work but also employment status for a group of low-skilled women employees in the context of subcontracting⁷.

Lastly, a precise observation of a remarkably long strike (1 year) by some of the women employed in subcontractor companies shall reveal social cleavages and relations within the company. The study of this labor dispute brings to light issues underlying working time in terms of social recognition of work value and employment stat.