The notion of "Employment Grey Zone" is not unknown economists, lawyers and sociologists. We found it in many writings, for example to emphasize the persistence of informal employment in emerging countries (ILO, 2005); to highlight the difficulties in establishing a clear separation between the activities of employees and self-employed (Supiot, 2000); or even to describe the blurring of responsibilities of the direct employer in "multi-employer" contracts (Rubery, Larchington, Earnshaw and Cooke, Vincent, 2002) or, more broadly, in international subcontracting networks (Drahogoupil, 2015).
Without being exhaustive, the object of our contribution aims to clarify the reasons for the persistence and multiplication of these grey zones in the heart of the "employee - employer" relationship.
To address this issue, we define the notion of "Employment Grey Zone" as a “set of work and employment relations whose regulation is codified according to non-official (instituted) rules". In our approach, the notion of "grey zone" doesn't mean lack of consistency or control, but weakness or porosity of the law and legal norms at the national level. This perspective considers the notion of "Employment Grey Zone" not as a dysfunction of the rules governing the employee/employer relationship but as a structural characteristic of the context of globalisation (Dieuaide, 2017). On this basis, two possible explanations can be advanced priori to try to understand this phenomenon of “grey zone”:
-A first explanation refers to the limits of the creation process of the labor law for adjusting national legal framework to the reality of the behavior of the actors. This explanation insist in priority on the crisis of the neo-corporatiste model and the choice of doctrine of States in favour of neoliberalism (Baccaro, Howell, 2011; Amable, 2016 for the case of the France) and governance multi-level (Harmes, 2006). Thus, the area covered by the institutions and the field of the employment relationship at the local level would never coincide perfectly.
-A second explanation emphasizes the importance of the FMN and value chains. The development of transnational networks of production and exchange changes deeply local conditions of regulation and imbedding of employment relations located in different production sites (Lakhani, Kuruvilla, Avgar, 2013). In this context, the notion of employment grey area is intimately related to an “outlaw regulation” or “delegalization” process of employment relationship through the strategies and the multi-level governance of the MNC, particularly in the field of the management of employment and human resources (Greer, Hauptmaier, 2016; Dieuaide, 2012).
The notion of "Employment Grey Zone" that we propose to discuss refers to the analysis of these two levels of regulation of the relationship of employment and their articulation. On the basis of academic scholars, monographs and surveys, mainly in automobile sector, we focus on two central dimensions of the “grey zones”:
1 / the asymmetry of power between 'corporate' (transnational) and the local level (subsidiaries) of the employment relationship management in large transnational groups.
2 / the involvement and responsibility of the State and labour law in the training and development of the grey areas of employment. Special attention will be paid to the french case with the successive reforms of labour law since the beginning of the 2000s, including the El Khomri law recently passed.
References
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Baccaro L., Howell C. (2011) A common neoliberal trajectory: The transformation of Industrial relations in advanced capitalism, Politics and Society, vol 39 (4), pp 521-63.
Dieuaide P. (2017), De quelle régulation la notion de « zone grise d’emploi » est-elle le nom ?, Revue Interventions Economiques, (forthcoming).
Dieuaide P., (2012), "Institutional Permeability” and Employment Relations in Europe: a Comparative Perspective on HR Policies in MNCs in France and the CEECs, Journal of the Institute for Euroregional Studies, Spring, vol. 13, p. 119-129.
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