Le temps partiel moins attractif ?. Nouvelles régulations temporelles dans deux secteurs de services

Part time work has long been a privileged management tool for companies in the ?hotel and catering? and ?retail trade? service sectors seeking to adjust employment volume to companies? needs that are not easy to anticipate. However, since the end of the nineties, these part time contracts have become less and less flexible as the legislator has increased their legal framework and regulated their use. The aim of public authorities was to minimise the lack of job security which characterised part time positions, mainly occupied by unskilled women. This article deals with the implementation of these legislative changes within the service sector: how did national industrial partners translate them into collective bargaining agreements? How did companies react to these new labour laws? Based on a qualitative study conducted from 2009 to 2011, this article analyses the issues of part time work in the service sector and the effects of new legislation at every level of collective regulation: legal structures, collective bargaining agreements, company agreements, and practical experiments in companies. The authors also give an account of new flexible organizational patterns in companies, linking part time work to more polyvalence, polyactivity and polycompetence.