Flexicurité - Lentic

“Workforce pooling”:

This concerns testing the possibility for companies in the Liege region of creating jobs via the sharing of seasonal and/or part-time workers, within a flexicurity perspective.

The LENTIC and FAR have carried out several actions in this direction:

Diagnosis of the needs of companies in the Liege region in terms of a seasonal workforce and/or part-time skills
Involvement of the companies by means of actions
Informing & awareness-raising regarding workforce pooling opportunities
In-depth analysis of requirements (seasonal variations in activity, workforce profiles, descriptions of posts, etc.)
Constitution of partnerships between companies with complementary requirements
Support of the partnerships throughout the process of innovation involving the workforce pooling practice (organisational, HR, legal aspects, etc.)
Continuous evaluation of the pilot projects from a perspective of economically and socially responsible flexicurity.

Several pooling projects are in progress:

Collaboration between logistics companies in order to pool the part-time workforce and to be able to offer full-time permanent contracts to the pooled workers, rather than jobs with unusual hours
Collaboration between a large distribution company and teleservices companies, in order to pool workers according to the commercial profile and thus to be able to more effectively manage the seasonal activity peaks facing them
Collaboration between SMEs in order to share workers carrying out qualified support roles (commercial secretary, computer technician, quality manager, packaging and logistics specialist, internal communication manager, graphic designer, etc.)

“Flexible career transition workforce pool”:

This concerns the creation in the Liege region of a staff provision “platform” meeting the one-off and recurring workforce requirements expressed by companies from the social economy sector, within a logic of career transition

Our role is to support the entire innovation process inherent in the implementation of this system and the collaboration it supports, in such a way that it fits into an economically and socially responsible flexicurity logic.

Description of the project:

In this industrial labour pool undergoing economic reconversion, numerous workers are falling victim to restructuring operations that affect the subcontracting companies from the old steel industry, which has been continually restructuring for several decades. These workers are attempting to retrain in new “growth” sectors on which the region is banking, such as value-added logistics, the agri-foodstuffs industry, or the service sector. However, these activity sectors are subject to significant flexibility constraints, due to the power of their order-givers and their position at the end of the value chain: seasonal work or work on limited time slots, unpredictable activity peaks and poorly qualified posts. They can consequently only offer relatively insecure working conditions to their workforce, so precarious and part-time contracts are now the norm for a growing number of workers from this industrial labour pool.

Against this background, several companies are expressing flexibility requirements which cannot be met by temporary workers, but also requirements for the securitisation of their workforce supply. This is also the case for numerous social economy companies, dynamic actors in local economic redeployment, who are attempting to tailor their service offer to suit their clients’ flexibility needs but whose social purpose does not prevent them from being faced with flexibility needs similar to those of traditional commercial companies.

Informed of the existence of these flexibility and security requirements, our research centre has facilitated contact between the actors concerned in order to stimulate reflection on the best way to respond to these diverse yet complementary wishes. This process of reflection among partners has permitted the outlining of a workforce pooling project: the idea is for the different social economy companies to join forces to create an umbrella structure, which will employ the flexible workers and support their retraining. This structure will thus be the employer of a pool of workers who will be available to meet two types of needs:

Needs expressed by traditional companies for surrounding services, i.e. mail services, maintenance of green space, security guards, etc.
Occasional needs, of social economy companies as well as of traditional private companies, for flexible staff trained in their products and procedures.

Courtesy of this system, the social economy companies at the base of this pool, just like the region’s commercial companies, will be able to benefit from a workforce that is flexible but still familiar with their organisational contexts and trained in their work processes. The workers, for their part, will be able to enjoy secure working conditions (since they will benefit from a permanent and full-time employment contract) as well as social support to facilitate their integration into the different contexts and the linking together of the different services. These diverse services, to which will be added the training to be delivered to them by the pool, will enable them to enhance their employability and will favour their prospects for “sideways” movement into one of the user companies. A contact will serve to bind the pool and its various users so that the latter prioritise the use of workers from the pool whenever a workforce requirement of this type arises within their structure.

“The company in reverse”: Constitution of a new multi-activity company via the detection of secondary individual skills.

This concerns the support and evaluation of a pilot experiment conducted by Arcelor-Mittal within the framework of the restructuring of its Liege sites, with the aim of facilitating the career conversion of workers by creating new activities based on an inventorisation of workers’ secondary skills (i.e. other than those connected with the steelmaking profession).

Our aim is to analyse the conditions under which such a system could be included within a logic of economically and socially responsible flexicurity, and be transferred or rolled out to other settings.

Description of the system:

Due to changes in its profession and the international situation, the Arcelor Group, which has since become Arcelor-Mittal, was forced to restructure certain part of its activity. It decided upon the gradual closure of the hot phase at its Liege site, due to its poor profitability. As this site included other entities active in the cold phase of the steelmaking process, the social plan negotiated within the context of the restructuring envisaged the transfer of as many retrainable workers as possible to the cold phase, and the use of early retirement for those workers of an appropriate age. This strategy enabled compulsory redundancies to be avoided, the implementation to be staggered over several years, governed by the closure programme for the different blast furnaces, and the gradual accession of older workers to the early retirement system. However, this restructuring strategy was costly for the company, since a good section of the workers awaiting early retirement were unoccupied or overmanning non-renewable posts, whereas the company was committed to maintaining their salary and all associated rights and benefits.

To lighten this burden while at the same time maintaining their status and salary, the Arcelor-Mittal Group decided to set up an innovative system, already tested as part of the restructuring of another of its European facilities: “the company in reverse”. This amounted to the creation of a new multi-activity company, based on the identification of the workers’ secondary skills (i.e. those unconnected with steelmaking). This company, named “Homme et Emploi”, remains the property of the steelmaking group with which it is integrated. It offers services internally to the group’s different entities based on the site undergoing restructuring, in three fields of activity:

Construction finishings
Maintenance of green spaces
Document archiving

Its workforce is made up of workers who are awaiting early retirement, regarded as “non-retrainable”, overmanning non-renewable posts or in a fragile situation due to health problems that make them unsuitable for the steelmaking industry. These workers are “seconded” to Homme et Emploi by the group’s different local entities, on the basis of a principle of “double voluntary action”. These entities remain, however, the legal employer of the workers whom they second, and these workers retain their full salaries and benefits connected with the post they occupied previously.

The turnover generated by the services supplied by Homme et Emploi is enabling the group to reduce the excess cost incurred keeping “non-profitable” workers in employment. The latter, meanwhile, enjoy the continuation of all their statutory benefits, independently of their actual working conditions, as well as end-of-career development through being appointed to a “different” or added-value position.