Two occupational groups facing the challenge of temporal availability : hospital nurses and bank managerial staff in France, Belgium and Spain

Résumé En

Many studies dealing with working time have demonstrated both the convergence of trends within the EU and the continuity of specific national features (Anxo et al., 1998; Daune-Richard, 1996; Freyssinet, 1999 ; Lallement, 2000). The conclusions reached depend on the level of the comparison, however. Drawing on statistical indicators or transformations of institutional regulation accentuates the convergences, while privileging comprehensive qualitative investigations emphasizes the singular aspects of the national contexts. Only multi-level, comparative approaches—which are still rare—offer the possibility of going beyond such a dichotomy (Michon, 2003). This is the perspective adopted here to study relationships between the formalized, represented and experienced dimensions of working time with regard to two occupational groups—female hospital nurses and bank managerial staff—in Belgium, France and Spain. After defining the sociological perspective and methodological approaches of this study, we provide certain background information about the three national contexts with regard to labour-market participation, employment, unemployment and working time by gender and age group on the one hand and the formalized regulation of working time on the other. We present the main findings concerning the three levels of time worked in the three countries, first for the nurses, and then for the bank managerial staff . The conclusion emphasizes the distance separating the two groups in all three cases and suggests how the approach used can shed light on the trade unions' difficulties in checking the growing power of neoliberal logics of flexibilization, fragmentation and imposed individualization of temporal availability.