Employability and Industrial Mutations

5Staying in the Game: Employability and Mobile Careers in the IT Industry

Self-employed workers represented about 2.7 million workers in France in 2015. Even though the proportion of these workers with self-employed status continues to rise (Salembier and Théron 2018), this does not yet compensate for its decline over the last 30 years. The decline in recent decades of the agricultural, commercial and, to a lesser extent, the craft professions, in favor of the recent rise of more or less qualified service occupations (COE 2014; Fox 2014), often explains the media magnifying glass effect that lends freelance statuses exponential growth (Dortier 2016), giving rise to the idea that the end of traditional wage employment is near. However, it is clear that the diversity and opacity of these forms of employment are such that counting them is complex (Gazier 2016). We thus find the figure of the entrepreneur intermingled with that of the self-employed without employees: in fact, the category of freelancers includes a majority of self-employed people without employees (Bögenhold 2019). On thecontrary, the figures for this population do not take into account the tripartite forms of self-employment (activity and employment cooperatives, freelance administration), which are legally assimilated to salaried employment (Everaere 2014).

Freelancers correspond to workers who have chosen an independent employment status. In a context where the contemporary individual is called upon to “take ...