The recent Declaration by Muriel Pénicaud, former Minister of Labor, claiming that “the development of self-entrepreneurship damages the collective” on France Inter, has aroused strong reactions. Behind the legitimate indignation of many self-employed, a structural reality is essential: the boom in self-entrepreneurship is not the problem, but the symptom of a salary system in difficulty.
A labor market in profound changes
For two decades, traditional wage earnings foundations have been wasting. Administrative rigidities, heavy taxation, hyperregulation: for companies, recruiting has become a risky bet. Faced with an unstable environment, the outsourcing of skills has become a pragmatic response. The development of self-employed entrepreneurship is not the fruit of an individualistic fashion; It is the direct consequence of a market which favors agility to permanence.
For their part, many self -employed workers do not reject the collective. They create new ones. Collective freelancers, sectoral support networks, ad hoc collaborations: the economic fabric is organized differently, but the spirit of cooperation remains. The modern self-employed is not a free electron; He is an actor of a reinvented collective.
Public policies in the face of their own contradictions
Accusing self-entrepreneurship to weaken the collective amounts to obscuring recent history. The creation of the status in 2009, its extension under different governments, then its active promotion during the years 2010, aimed at a clear objective: to reduce mass unemployment by facilitating access to independent work. The self-employed has become an economic adjustment variable, encouraged for its ability to generate activity without weighing down the social burden.
Developing today this dynamic amounts to condemning the effects of a policy that has been shaped yourself. The precariousness of certain independents is not of their choice, but the economic and social conditions in which they evolve. Rather than making the scapegoats, it would be more relevant to question the capacity of the salary model to respond to new professional aspirations: autonomy, flexibility, meaning.
Towards a redefinition of the collective
The accusation made against self-entrepreneurship is based on an obsolete vision of the collective: that of a homogeneous group governed by fixed contracts. But the world of work is evolving. The collective, today, is fluid, modular, interconnected. It is organized around projects, skills, shared objectives, far beyond the link of classic subordination.
Freelancers, self-employed, hybrid workers: far from destroying the collective fabric, they participate in the emergence of new organizational models. These forms of professional engagement require adapted tools, institutional recognition, and not summary judgments.
Accusing the self -employed to weaken solidarity amounts to denying the opportunity to rethink collective work in the era of flexibility, rapid innovation and individual freedoms.
The development of self-employed entrepreneurship does not betray the collective
He reveals the obsolescence of his old forms. Faced with economic, technological and social changes, it would be futile to condemn those who adapt. The real challenge is to rebuild a collective up to these new realities. Not by opposing independence and solidarity, but by inventing bridges between professional freedom and collective commitment.
