Les régimes d’emploi précaire dans le secteur logistique. Enquête dans cinq entrepôts en France et en Allemagne

This article is based on a collective Franco-German research comparing five logistics warehouses in Paris, Frankfurt-am-Main, Orléans and Kassel. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of temporary employment as a tool of production and mobilisation of the workforce of logistics warehouses. This paper presents the regimes of precarious employment in this professional sector that is characterised by repetitive and demanding tasks, low salaries and very limited perspectives of career advancement. Even if they are depending on the differences of salaries and status between temporary and permanent workers in France and Germany, these regimes of precarious employment are mainly structured on a local level by the firms’ strategies that aim at attracting and retaining the workforce they need on the one hand, and by the tactics that the workers develop in order to manage this precariousness on the other hand. In this way, the construction of material and symbolic hierarchies between workers as well as between warehouses within the same territory organises the socio-professional captivities of temporary workers whether it be within the same single enterprise where they might be striving for a permanent contract or at the level of the whole logistics zone, where the circulations of the precarious workforce from one warehouse to another also contribute to the (re)production of the latter. JEL: L81, J63, M51, R23