By Connie & Benjamin Chow-Petit et Nicolas Loubet
Translated by: Connie Chow-Petit, Licence : CC by-SA International 4.0
The Community CDI: An experiment in community employment contracts
La Myne is a citizen laboratory, a community and a free and open source third place (TiLiOS). Its vocation is to support citizens who experiment with the future and act on transitions (habitat, food, energy, etc.), each in their own way (technical, artistic, scientific, etc.), through the commons. In 2017, the MYNE community, which is particularly involved in experimental actions and therefore by nature uncertain, felt a need to take care of its contributors, particularly through socio-economic security.
Indeed, at MYNE as in other ecosystems, individuals often end up burning out – even though the collective dynamism is vibrant. The community worked on several projects to try to address this situation.
This is how the idea of a “Community CDI” (CDI for Permanent Contract) emerged, first proposed in 2017 by Connie & Benjamin Chow-Petit.
It was born from three observations:
- The precarious socio-economic, legal and financial situation of the contributors in and around the La Myne community.
- The observation of a friction between different practices, from hierarchical and more conservative organisations to cooperative, entrepreneurial and more agile organisations.
- Many people “alternate” during their lives between “self-employment” in the broadest possible sense (jobseekers, benefit recipients, entrepreneurs, contributors to common goods or associations, self-entrepreneurs, etc.) and “traditional forms of employment” with office hours (9 to 5), where they are not as independent but more economically stable. This alternation is more often undergone than desired.
The Community CDI aims to be an open-ended contract that is not attached to a single person, but rather to a role and function or mission, carried out by a group of people who function in solidarity. This provides a form of stability, but also freedom for employees.
The first ingredients of this scheme aim to allow the transmission of knowledge, solidarity, freedom of internal organisation, but also a form of security for the employer and the people involved within a “contract to be invented”.
Since 2017, the idea of a Community CDI has really taken off. As we exchanged ideas with other structures and individuals, including ANACT (National Agency for the Improvement of Working Conditions), the desire for an experiment of this type was confirmed.
It should be noted that potential elements of the future Community CDI already exist in law: the principle of non-subordination of CESA contracts or the co-sponsorship by several people of the contracts of building caretaker couples, to take two examples.
We have experimented with different approaches and configurations, it is not perfect, we still need to find the balance. The germination of this experiment is already giving interesting and concrete results, particularly in what it allows for the recruiter, the employees, but also for the community dynamics. In particular, the “five-legged sheep” positions as known in the third places, with high complexity and cognitive load, seem particularly appropriate for Community CDIs – especially for questions of preservation of individuals and contributory dynamics; where the approaches by mission or by CDI present limits or biases.
If you would like to be involved or learn more about this experimental approach, it’s easy: contact La MYNE.
ANACT’s viewpoint
By: Amandine BRUGIERE,
responsible for technical and scientific
developments at ANACT
It was during a meeting organised in 2018 on “organisations producing the commons’ that we came across the Myne. The two day workshops sought to to understand whether organisations or collectives producing ‘commons’ – or producing in common – were endowed with a characteristic work organisation, less Taylorist and more participatory: what were the modes of governance put in place, the mechanisms for decision-making, workload sharing, recognition and valorisation? What were the modes of governance, decision-making, workload sharing, recognition and valorisation? The question of prevention of psycho-social risks was also The issue of psycho-social risk prevention was also present, as many of these structures reported forms of burn-out among their members. of their members.
These two days of joint work and the conference that followed convinced us of the interest and need to support these groups in the organisational innovations they were in the process of deploying. This is how a FACT experimentation project was set up, which allowed us to follow the “Community CDI” project over the long term. This proposal seeks to innovate in terms of the legal framework for employment. If it proves to be legally possible, it would not be without consequences, of course, for working arrangements and forms of collaboration within the collective the collective concerned, and this is what we were interested in anticipating to anticipate in conjunction with the Myne teams, in order to to avoid reproducing work contexts that are conducive to psychosocial psycho-social risks.
In the context of a Community CDI, the activity prescription from the employer must inevitably be discussed and self-regulated within the collective (distribution of activities over time, sharing of the load, positioning the workload, positioning between team members). Finally, the community CDI displaces some of the regulations of the regulations usually handled by the management to the work collective.to the work group. Greater collective functioning is thus is synonymous with more responsibility and coordination activities. coordination activities. But this is probably the price to pay for the price of greater democratisation of work organisations.