Pour sortir du no future

The text reproduced here forms the introduction and conclusion of a book by Guy Aznar La Fin des années chômage. La stratégie de l’emploi pluriel. In addition to its main purpose – to describe a strategy that will provide jobs for all within five years and reduce unemployment – the book is a plea against the prevailing fatalism in France and in Europe and in favour of creating a desirable future. This is the basic message – readers can judge for themselves – of the extracts we have chosen to publish.
The book is neither a novel nor a literary exercise. According to Guy Aznar, unemployment is such an integral part of our society that we no longer dare to imagine an alternative. He, however, takes the opposite position and builds a scenario in which “the 5 million people who are currently sidelined from the French social game are able to join in”. The author does not pretend to have discovered the one and only magic solution. On the contrary, he is indignant about the tendency to be obsessed with a single approach, and instead he takes a range of existing European proposals and combines them in a comprehensive strategy in favour of “multifaceted employment” (l’emploi pluriel).
This approach would involve work as both employee and freelance, regular and itinerant, putting together a package consisting of a variety of work patterns, simultaneously or successively, alternating with other activities for different periods and hours per day. Nevertheless, it is not a plea for total deregulation, but rather for a new social contract.