Vladimir Pecheu

Using rich historical surveys on job tasks and advanced machine learning techniques, we study which jobs can be moved from the office to home over three decades in France. The share of jobs that can be done from home has increased steadily from 14% in 1991 to 45% in 2021. At the same time, actual Working From Home (WFH) remained limited to less than one fifth of its full potential before the Covid-19 crisis and is still below it in 2021. The growth of WFH is largely unrelated to the evolution of job tasks, implying that the main obstacles to WFH have not been technical constraints. Low-skilled employees in particular have jobs that have long been largely teleworkable but they were barely teleworking before the Covid-19 crisis and remained still below 50% of their full potential during it. This pattern is not explained by differences in workers’ desire to telework. It implies that the well-known large inequality in access to WFH along the earnings distribution cannot be attributed only to feasibility constraints and is potentially inefficient.

Labor unions across the world differ markedly in their ideology, ranging from radical unions with an anti-capitalist ideology to cooperative reformists. To understand the effect of union ideology on worker outcomes, we study France’s institutional setting, where unions with sharply contrasting ideologies compete in workplace elections for collective bargaining rights. Workers and firms sort systematically by union ideology: low-wage workers and less productive establishments are more likely to be represented by radical unions, high-wage workers and more productive establishments tend to be represented by reformist unions. Conditional on establishment and worker effects, radical unions are associated with wage penalties, reformist unions with wage premia for workers (concentrated among white-collar workers). As an additional source of sharp variation in union representation, we focus on close establishment-level elections that determine which unions represent workers. Although close elections reveal no significant average wage effects, radical unions significantly reduce blue-collar worker exit rates relative to reformist unions. To understand the mechanisms underlying our results, we study bargaining behavior and find that electing a radical union leads to more strikes and more refusal to sign bargaining agreements compared to electing a reformist union. Radical unions appear to successfully protect blue-collar employment, but their confrontational approach does not yield wage gains for workers.

This paper is the first to compute lifetime earnings (LTE) in France for a large number of cohorts, that entered the labour market between 1967 and 1987. We analyze the trends across cohorts and gender, and document sharp differences with the United States, based on results in Guvenen et al. (2022). Median LTE show similar flat trends in both countries, but in France this results from a moderate increase for both genders together with increased female participation, while in the U.S., LTE declines for men and sharply grows for women. Most notably, we find that the gender LTE gap has been significantly larger in the U.S. than in France. Differences in working time explain an increasing share of the gender gap in LTE across successive cohorts, as the rise in women’s working years was primarily through part-time employment. Additionally, lower promotion opportunities for women account for a progressively larger share of the gender gap as we move up the distribution of earnings.

The existence of a peak at 49 employees in the firm size distribution in France, followed by a permanent decrease in the number of firms has been the starting point of political discourses and academic studies on the cost of size-dependent regulations at 50-employee. These features of the distribution are visible when firm size is declared by employers in fiscal data but not when it is reconstructed from individual-level social security data. This working paper explores these differences both from statistical and institutional viewpoints. It provides evidence showing that a large proportion of employers manipulate the firm size they declare in their fiscal documents. This manipulation generates the particular shape of the size distribution in the fiscal data. We discuss the rationale for such behavior: the key point is that the under-declaration in fiscal data is not subject to substantial sanctions and it can allow firms not to comply with the labor law. Event studies and comparisons of firms below and above the 50-employee threshold suggest that this threshold may only have limited effects on firm performance or growth potential. Consequently the welfare costs of the regulations at 50-employee might be smaller than what was found by some of the studies that assume a perfect compliance with the law.

I show that one reason why employers use profit sharing is to weaken their unions and increase their share of the surplus. I develop a model where by making compensation dependent on output, profit sharing weakens unions’ ability to motivate employees to strike. Unions lose reputation for being strong, which further reduces their bargaining power. Resorting to plausibly exogenous variation in the aggressiveness of unions, I show that employers anticipate this increased threat by a larger usage of profit sharing. Its payment leads to a reduction in strike length, and to a drop in wage growth of 13%. The effect is concentrated on lower occupations for whom growth is almost halved.

The paper studies how the personal career of union (or worker) representatives is tied to the conditions in which revenues are shared between labor and capital at the firm-level. We argue that employers can have a strategic interest in either favoring or discriminating against union representatives in order to lower workers’ bargaining power. The first strategy (favoritism) amounts to “buying the social peace” and can only be implemented with willing representatives. The second (discrimination) is a way to stigmatize vindictive representatives and curb their demands, notably by discouraging other workers to join the union. The behavior of union representatives during firm negotiations and the stake of those negotiations influence employers’ willingness to use one or the other of those strategies. We formalize this theory with a model and provide evidence to support it using a rich survey for France in 2017 combined with administrative data on earnings and firm performance. Union representatives that are the most active during their mandate or represent the most campaigning unions have worse career outcomes, while those that do not participate in strikes experience a wage premium. Workers are in turn more likely to think that joining a union will negatively affect their career in firms where union representatives are paid less than their colleagues or feel discriminated against. Together, these results show that employers’ capacity to affect representatives’ careers can impair the quality of workers’ representation and workers’ ability to organize collectively in order to take part in the firm decision-making process.