#6 May 24, 2023

« Assessing Progress with ‘Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territory’ in France and Belgium: Key Lessons for the Design of a Job Guarantee »

Time: 7am San Francisco | 8am Mexico City | 9am Bogota | 10am Santiago-NYC-Montréal | 4pm Paris–Johannesburg | 7.30pm New Delhi | 9pm Jakarta | 12am Sydney

Location: online (click here to register)

Organizers: #DemocratizingWork and OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative

Speakers: Auriane Lamine (Professor of law at the University of Louvain), Antonin Gregorio (Director, Territoires Zéro Chômeurs de Longue Durée, France), Timothée Duverger (Professor at Sciences Po Bordeaux, Centre Emile Durkheim. President of the TZCLD Observatory)

Chair: Pavlina Tcherneva (Bard College)

Over the past five years, France has been experimenting with the idea of a Job Guarantee. The original approach aimed to create jobs for long-term unemployed individuals who were willing to get back to work. This led to the implementation of the « Zero Long-term Unemployment Territory » experiment, which was set in place by the central public national authority but is administered locally through a participatory method that gives aspiring workers a voice and involves all public and private stakeholders.

The program has now been expanded to more than 50 locations, providing an opportunity to assess how a Job Guarantee program could be grounded in the three principles of the #DemocratizingWork Manifesto. This program’s emancipatory potential for fighting involuntary unemployment has inspired regional authorities in Belgium to adopt a similar approach. The panel will critically evaluate the current conditions for the successful deployment of such a program in Belgium.

The panelists, Antonin Gregorio and Timothée Duverger, will provide their perspectives on the situation in France, with Gregorio focusing on the practical aspects and Duverger evaluating public policies. Law professor Auriane Lamine will assess the conditions necessary for a successful deployment of such a project in Belgium.

Auriane Lamine is a legal scholar who specializes in Labour Law (PhD Louvain 2016, LLM Harvard 2013) and a philosopher (MA Louvain 2014). She is currently an Associate Professor of law at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), where she teaches International, European and Belgian Labour and social security law. She is a member of the CRIDES Research Center (Centre de Recherches Entreprise, Droit et Société, UClouvain). Her recent work focuses on the comparative study of collective bargaining systems, the regulation of multinational firms and non-standard forms of work.

Antonin Gregorio With a degree in social law and political science, he began his professional career at the National Assembly as a social advisor. He will follow the examination of reforms in the field of social law. In 2015, he accompanied Laurent Grandguillaume, then a deputy, in the writing and parliamentary review of the law that will allow the « Territoires zéro chômeur de longue durée » project to be experimented on 10 territories. In September 2019, he joined the national team of the association Territoires zéro chômeur de longue durée, as executive director.

Timothée Duverger is a research engineer at Sciences Po Bordeaux and a researcher at the Centre Émile Durkheim. At Sciences Po Bordeaux, he is the director of the ‘Territoires de l’ESS’ Chair and the ‘Économie sociale et solidaire et innovation sociale’ Master’s course and co-directs the Executive Master’s course ‘Stratégies, Territoires et projets innovants dans l’ESS’. His research work deals with public policies, intellectual history and social history concerning in the field of social and solidarity economy. He is president of the Observatory of « Territories with Zero long-term Unemployment ». He has recently published L’économie sociale et solidaire (coll. Repères, La découverte, 2023).

Participation in this event is free but registration is needed: click here to register.