According to this study by the Institut Montaigne, “there is no break between before and after Covid in the individual relationship that working people have with their work”, apart from the increased use of teleworking.
Is the post-Covid break that is often described in the relationship of the French to work, based on “great resignation”, loss of meaning or even “quiet quitting”, a chimera? A study by the Institut Montaigne, which is based on a vast survey by Kantar Public conducted among 5,001 active French people, calls into question certain received ideas. In particular the lack of fulfillment of French workers. “As previous studies have already shown, the majority of French people are satisfied with their work», notes the synthesis of the study, which notes that «77% of working people give a score greater than or equal to 6/10 to the question “how satisfied are you when you think about your job today?”».
Likewise, the supposedflame epidemicdoes not translate into numbers. Firstly, “working time has been stable since the 2000s, after 30 years of decline», notes the study. Paradoxically, a large majority of working people (60%) feel that their workload has increased over the past five years. On the other hand, “the desire to “work more to earn more” remains frequent and largely outweighs that of “working less even if it means earning less”“, underlines the authors of the study, Bertrand Martinot and Lisa Thomas-Darbois. Indeed, if a relative majority of full-time employees (47%) do not wish to see their working hours modified, they are much more likely to say they are ready to “Work more to earn more(31%) than towork less even if it means earning less» (15%).
The “myth” of the “great resignation”
The study also sheds light on the increase in atypical working hours, particularly among executives. “Only 40% of full-time employees (and 13% of the self-employed) report both working only Monday to Friday and never working after 8 p.m. – whether at home or at their place of work – or on days holidays», Points out the authors of the report. As for the massive rejection of the increase in the legal retirement age, again observed in this study – only 7% of working people consider that 62 years is insufficient -, “it is probably more the result of a more general political crisis than a manifestation of a sudden collapse in the “value of work”“says the study.
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The study finally deconstructs what it calls the “myth” from “big resignation». «Resignations, for all reasons, remain at a very low level as a proportion of the salaried workforce given the tight labor market situation“, she notes. For the authors,the essential explanation for the significant increase in terminations at the origin of employees seems rather related to the improvement in the labor market observed in recent years, and especially since the post-Covid period».
In summary then,there is no break between before and after Covid in the individual relationship that workers have with their work», Estimates the study, apart from one thing: the use of telework. Its distribution, which the authors describe as “extraordinaire», «constitutes THE major break in terms of working conditions compared to the “pre-Covid world”“. At the end of 2022, 40% of workers say they practice teleworking at least occasionally, compared to 7.4% in 2017 according to INSEE.
