This article highlights the importance of power relations in inter-firm relations and analyses their impact on firms' employment management practices. We show, firstly, that the use of subcontracting creates a chain of inter-firm economic dependency because it leads the principal contractor to...

The proposals aiming at reducing or making more flexible job protection are built upon the hypothesis according to which firms are forced to adapt toincreasing uncertainty of demand and activity. Analysing firms' behaviour in French industry, this paper shows that the increase in sub-contracting...

France has witnessed a significant rise in the recourse to sub-contracting over the last twenty years. However the latter is not to be seen as a response to the supposedly growing instability of the economic environment. It is primarily a further stage in the effective subordination of labour to...