L’État et les salaires depuis 1945 (2) : de l’État employeur aux marges du salariat

The first volume of the proceedings of the symposium organized by Chatefp in June 2023 examined the way in which the state regulates wages through collective bargaining, the socialized portion of remuneration or a minimum wage. This second volume shifts the focus, looking beyond and/or beyond what might be termed the "standard" wage relationship, looking at both the state itself as employer, and at certain margins of the wage economy that the state helps to regulate (sometimes even institute) in a variety of ways. Many workers are employed by the State - an entity that is itself diverse, if only if we confine ourselves to the tripartition between the three Public Services (State, Hospital and Territorial). Within the State, there is considerable heterogeneity in terms of status, and hence in terms of remuneration. Indeed, the State employs not only civil servants, but also a large number of auxiliaries and other contract workers, who are a constant feature of the history of public employment. In this respect, an analysis of their remuneration methods reveals a great deal about the history of the civil service itself. Moreover, public-sector employment still needs to be extended to include employees of nationalized companies, as well as being analyzed in terms of how it is structured, if we return to state civil servants. This volume opens up a vast field of study little explored by social science researchers, where knowledge is still largely fragmentary, if not in its infancy, even if the number of studies is increasing and the historiography is thickening somewhat in recent years. Research has also recently taken up questions relating to state intervention on wages in a different way: in contrast to what makes the state, and those who make it, it is at the margins that work is developing on the ways in which the state intervenes (or not, and/or closely or distantly) on the more marginal segments of labor markets. This is the case for workers in the colonies, particularly after 1945 and before independence, but also for other workers, caught up in singular public policies - such as those constructed by the State in France in the cultural sphere, with the status of intermittent workers - or, on the contrary, in "non-policies" that do not regulate the development of new statuses, such as these platform workers over the last ten years in France, as much as anywhere else in the world. Between the state as employer and the margins of the salaried workforce, this second volume focuses less on the heart of the salaried workforce than on the halo that surrounds it, whether that be the numerous, structured jobs in the civil service and nationalized companies, or all those jobs, further removed from the salaried model, held by workers in the colonies, "intermittents du spectacle" or platform workers.