Inter-firm Dependency and Employment Inequalities

Corinne Perraudin, Héloïse Petit, Nadine Thèvenot, Bruno Tinel and Julie Valentin
Additional contact information
Corinne Perraudin: CES, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France
Nadine Thèvenot: CES, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France
Bruno Tinel: CES, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France
Julie Valentin: CES, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2014, vol. 46, issue 2, 199-220

Abstract: This article highlights the importance of power relations in subcontracting relationships and analyzes their impact on firms’ employment management practices. We show that the use of subcontracting creates a chain of inter-firm economic dependency because it leads the principal contractor to plan and control the activities of the subcontractors. The hypothesis is that this chain of dependency influences both the skill structure and wage levels. Empirical tests carried out on French data confirm that firms that subcontract outsource execution tasks and that the hierarchy of firms impacts employees’ wage levels.

Keywords: subcontracting; skills; wages; power relation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J82 L24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/46/2/199.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:46:y:2014:i:2:p:199-220

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().