A "Hijacked Salaried Status" in French Cooperatives of Freelance Workers: The Political Meaning of Shifts Between Standard and Non-standard Employment.

This article considers a specific sub-type of non-standard employment-self-employment-through a particular type of cooperative in France: the Business and Employment Cooperatives (BEC), i.e., collectives of freelance workers. BECs aim to provide an indefinite employment contract-and the social protection associated with it-to these individuals who therefore become "salaried entrepreneurs." To better understand the gray zones of work, where legal status, practices and identities are often disconnected, this inquiry is based on a qualitative approach to social actors' practices. It shows, on a meso level, how BECs "hijack" the standard wage-labor contract on the grounds that this is emancipatory and therefore drag it into a non-standard form of employment. In addition with this first shift between the legal framework and its interpretation, a second shift occurs as each member of the cooperative-a "false wage earner"-develops a singular relationship to the constraints related to such a contract. Through the notion of "praxis," combining both objective and subjective dimensions of work, we are able to systematize the analysis of qualitative data and identify the factors that influence such a diversity of appropriations: the relationship to conflictuality and political competence. Finally, this article highlights the conditions under which social actors make a wide range of appropriations of common legal frameworks, whose flexibility requires us to consider employment relationships as variant and creative practices rather than as "perfect" or "deviant" forms.