Organizational Change, Job Entry, and Salaried Careers[Innovations organisationnelles, entrée dans l'emploi et carrières salariales]

This paper examines how organisational changes and ICT adoption affect workers' wages and wages progression. We use the 1997 French survey on organisational change and ICT use (COI 1997), which is a matched employer/employee survey describing both changes occurring in the life of manufacturing firms between 1994 and 1997, and labour market history of employees that are present in those firms in 1996. We develop three indicators for this study: wages in 1996, wage differentials over the 1994-1996 period, and wage differentials related to the last change of employer. We then measure the impact of organisational change, ICT adoption and time of entry in the firm on these three indicators. We observe the wages of new entrants, those that have been hired in 1994 or 1995. They have on average a lower wage than employees with longer tenure, higher wage growth and, because of the bad economic general situation, they have suffered wage losses while changing employer. But firm reorganisations at the moment of their entry transform this average profile and organisational changes have effects that are opposite to ICT adoption: positive for the former, negative for the latter.