Non-permanent staff account for a significant proportion of the public sector workforce (around 20 per cent in 2011), a proportion that has increased over the last two decades. These jobs offer greater flexibility in public sector human resources management by enabling the sector to adapt to fluctuations in activity and to recruit staff with new skills. Nevertheless, they pose a risk of precarious employment for some public sector staff, which explains the repeated efforts to limit the use of non-permanent employment through a strict regulatory framework, or even to reduce it through policies promoting permanent appointments.
Beyond the tension between these two approaches, this study aims to provide quantified data to better understand the use of non-permanent staff in the public sector and its recent trends, with a view to developing projections for its future development.
Three databases were used to analyse the employment of non-permanent staff. The first, which forms the core of this project, is the administrative database of the civil service’s non-permanent staff scheme, Ircantec. It contains information on the characteristics of jobs and employers for all periods of contributions to Ircantec for individuals born between October 1971 and 2011; this database provides a comprehensive source of information on non-permanent employment that had never before been utilised for academic research purposes. Data from the 2009 cross-scheme sample of contributors (EIC) were also used and statistically matched with the Ircantec data to obtain an overview of contributors’ career paths. Finally, data from INSEE’s Employment Surveys, covering the period from 1980 to 2011, were analysed, providing a more detailed examination of the characteristics of non-permanent workers and the jobs they hold.
