Multiple jobholding and path-dependent employment regimes: Answering the qualification and protection needs of multiple job holders

The flexibilisation of labour markets is called for by most political and economic and firms as the sesame towards economic competitiveness. But do employment systems and social protection regimes provide the workforce with the adequate social incentives - in the form of secured, qualifying and acknowledged transitions between or combinations of occupations, that would at the same time facilitate and legitimize this labour flexibility ? To answer this question from a very empirical point of view and in a diagnosis form, this study takes a particular form of non-standard employment - multiple jobholding - and explores first, on the basis of the scarce data available in the OECD, the differentiated occupational profiles it is hiding, from post-modern employment forms to archaic and 'bad jobs'. It concentrates then, through a single French case-study, on the training and social policy issues at stake in making multiple jobholding a qualifying and secured form of employment. The French case appears as a negative yardstick to measure the inertia of employment systems in departing from the norm of 'normal' employment understood as full-time monooccupational male employment.