The careers of non-tenured public sector employees: retrospective analysis and projections.

Summary Non-tenured staff represent a significant share of the public sector workforce (about 20% in 2011), a share that has increased over the past two decades. These jobs offer greater flexibility in human resource management in the public sector by adapting to variations in activity and recruiting staff with new skills. Nevertheless, they represent a risk of casualization for a part of the public sector workforce, which explains the repeated efforts to limit the use of non-tenured employment through a restrictive regulatory framework, or even to reduce it through tenure policies. Beyond the opposition between these two logics, this study aims to provide quantified elements that will allow a better understanding of the use of non-permanent staff in the public sector and its recent evolution, in order to develop projections of its future evolution. Three databases were used to analyze the employment of non-regulars. The first, at the center of this project, is the administrative database of the non-tenured civil service scheme, Ircantec. It contains information on the characteristics of jobs and employers for all contribution periods to Ircantec for individuals born in October from 1971 to 2011. This database provides a comprehensive source of information on non-tenured employment that has never before been used for academic research. Data from the 2009 inter-regime sample of contributors (EIC) were also used, and were statistically matched to Ircantec data to obtain an overall view of contributors' careers. Finally, data from the INSEE employment surveys, from 1980 to 2011, were used, providing a more detailed analysis of the characteristics of non-tenured workers and the jobs they hold.