Bien agiter avant l’emploi. De l’activation des politiques d’emploi à l’agitation des chômeurs

By articulating a pragmatic approach of the labor market intermediaries with a systemic approach of the interactions at the State’s counters, the authors study the follow-up and accompaniment procedure of jobseekers in Belgium, within three public employment services. This procedure appears today as the most successful realization of a reform process, within the employment policies, that is still in progress since the middle of the 1990, under the influence of the European institutions (the European employment strategy). The authors analyze the role of the National Employment Office’s facilitators, the agents who are in charge of the jobseekers’ following-up procedure, that is the control of their effort to find a job. They also focus on the role of the employment counselors of two regional public services by showing that the employability – the official target of the activation policies – operate as a way to speak abstractly of employment and unemployment, as a way to sustain and to intensify the communication at the State’s counters. The action of the labor market intermediaries, qualified by the authors as a moral enterprise, can be characterized by its self-referential nature: to socialize the job seekers, to make them sensitive to the norms and standards of employability that are at stake in the three public employment services. According to the authors, the ‘labor market’ acts as a fiction: a simplified reconstruction of the world of work, within the political system, that serve as a readily available reference for the public action of intermediation.