Alain Bihr & Roland Pfefferkorn
Déchiffrer les inégalités (Investigating Inequalities)
Paris, Syros, 1999 (First Edition : 1995)

Contents

Introduction	11

Chapter 1 

Inequalities on the Labour Market	23
	Unemployment, Precarious Job, Underemployment: an Appraisal	24
	Inequalities & Unemployment	27
	Inequalities & Job Precariousness	32
	Inequalities & Underemployment	38

Chapter 2

Inequalities in Sources of Primary Income	43
	Wages	44
	Professions’ Earnings	50
	Property Income	54
	The Economic Crisis: Losers and Winners	58

Chapter 3

Inequalities and Social Levies	63
	Direct Taxation	65
	Indirect Taxation	76
	Social Contributions	78
	Social Levies: Progressive or Regressive with Income Level?	81

Chapter 4

Inequalities in Social Security Benefits	87
	Methodological Issues	89
	Contributory Benefits	91
	Child Benefits, Family Allowances	93
	Minimum Income Support	108

Chapter 5

Inequalities in Disposable Income	121
	Redistribution: Effective but Limited	122
	Inequalities in Living Standards Between Social Classes	125
	Being Poor in France Today	134
	Being Wealthy in France Today	149

Chapter 6

Inequalities in Consumption	157
	Disparities in Consumption Levels & Structures	158
	Impact of the Standard of Living	162
	Impact of the Standard of Consumption	166

Chapter 7

Inequalities in Asset Distribution	173
	Unequal Amounts	175
	Inequalities in Asset Structure	181
	Inequalities in Inheritance	186
	Upper-Income Groups	190	
Chapter 8

Inequalities in Housing	195
	People without Access to Housing Benefit	196
	Lease-holder or Tenant?	205
	Housing Quality	213
	Spatial and Temporal Inequalities	219

Chapter 9

Inequalities in Health 	229
	Social Inequalities regarding Morbidity and Mortality	230
	Health in the Workplace	238
	Unequal Access to Health Care	249

Chapter 10

Inequalities in Education	255
	Diversity in Educational Trajectories & Achievement	258
	Diplomas and Entry into the Workforce	274	An Educational System which Reinforces Social Inequalities	280

Chapter 11

Inequalities in Time Budget	289
	Daily Constraints & Leisure Time	290
	Inequalities in Leisure Time	295
	Vacation	317

Chapter 12

Inequalities in Public Life	323
	Participation in Not-for-Profit Associations & Unions	324
	Participation in Political Life	330
	Inequalities & Media	344
	Inequalities & French Courts & Criminal law	346

Chapter 13

A Systemic View of Inequalities	355
	A System of Interactions	356
	Cumulative Inequalities	362
	Reproduction of Inequalities	373

Conclusion: Reducing Inequalities	391

Appendix	399

List of Charts 	410

Conference Summary

Monday, 20 November 2000

The attendants of the first meeting were the following:

	Pierre Concialdi, Economist, Research Director at the Institute of Social & Economic Research (IRES) located in Paris.  He is currently conducting research on salaries & revenues.
	Antoine Math, Economist, was a member of the Research Department at CNAF (the National Family Allowance Fund which is responsible for Family Policy in France) until 1998.  He was recently a researcher at the DGV European Commission in Brussels; he recently joined IRES.  His work has essentially focused on social protection, welfare and minimum income support.
	Michel Pincon & Monique Pincon-Charlot, Sociologists, Research Directors at CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) have been conducting several studies on the sociology of upper classes and wealthy families in France.
	Riccardo Bellofiore, Economist, University of Bergamo, Italy.  His interests lay in globalisation & post-Fordism.  He has coordinated research in the area of labour market & labour organisation.
	Vittorio Rieser, Economist & Sociologist, Member of  IRES (Torino), interested in labour organisation & social inequalities.
	Jeanne Fagnani, Sociologist, Research Director at CNRS (MATISSE-University of Paris 1) and Research Advisor at CNAF where she has conducted research into social transfers (particularly Child Benefit) and family policies in Europe.
	Bernard Friot, Economist, Professor at Nancy-II University and researcher at GREE-CNRS,  has been focusing primarily on social protection as well as on the wage system and Welfare.
	Jean-Pascal Higele, currently preparing a PhD at GREE on a comparative study in France and UK on the benefits provided to the unemployed.
	And finally Alain Bihr, Sociologist at the University of Haute-Alsace, and Roland Pfefferkorn, Sociologist at the University Marc-Bloch located in Strasbourg.  Together they have conducted a research on social inequalities and gender  which could provide a theoretical background to this current project.
	Francis Kern, Economist, Dean of the School of Economics and Management at Louis-Pasteur University in Strasbourg as well as Pascal Politanski, Political Scientist and Professor at UFM of Strasbourg also attended the meeting as observers.

As a result of the discussions during this meeting, the following four points of agreement were identified:
1.	The first objective of this project will be to establish the state of the art concerning researches and debates on social inequalities within EU countries. A conference to be convened in Strasbourg in the spring of 2002 is planned to finalise this objective.
2.	In the first phase, it seems preferable to limit the scope of this study to a limited number of countries.  The participants chose the following countries: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom, and Sweden.
3.	It seems also preferable to restrict the scope of the study to a limited number of dimensions in the field of research on inequalities.  The choices of participants were the following:
- Four sectors: inequalities in the workforce, inequalities regarding income and salaries, inequalities regarding social protection, and lastly inequalities in education.
- Two cross-sectional aspects: one focused on the dominant social group (the bourgeoisie); the other focused on analyses of the debates (political and theoretical) that rose up from the concept of inequality in each of the aforementioned countries.
4.	Participants have then committed themselves to contact various research institutions that could be interested in similar work either to propose them to collaborate in this project or to suggest names of colleagues who might be interested.

During the next meeting in Spring 2001, the participants will report on their different contacts. The group will welcome the new teams and individuals who will join and will start preparing the organisation of the conference to be held in Spring 2002.

Social inequalities in Europe

Research Proposal MISHA
February 2001

The aim of this paper is to briefly present a research project which would address issues related to social inequalities in Europe.  This research would be co-ordinated by people currently working in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Alsace (MISHA), a public research institution.  Therefore, we are looking for academic teams or researchers who would be interested in collaborating with us on this project.

We would like to investigate social inequalities on the wider European level than France alone (see Contents of our book Déchiffer les inégalités dealing with these issues in our country).  We are of course aware of the immediate difficulties inherent in such a project and are therefore willing to make modifications to the original intentions from which this project was inspired.

- In the first place, it will be necessary to limit the field of our investigation to a small number of European Union member states.  This does not mean that we are abandoning our eventual desire to cover all the member states of the EU.  However our initial investigation will concentrate on the following countries : France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

- Secondly, it is our strong desire to cover a wide range of social inequalities: inequalities between social categories, gender inequalities, age inequalities, inequalities between citizens and foreigners, and finally, spatio-temporal inequalities (between regions, cities and countryside, large metropolitan areas and small towns, city centres and suburbs).  Here again, during the first stage, we must limit ourselves to selecting one or two dimensions for further study, most likely the first two we have mentioned (see Conference summary).

- Thirdly, we propose our initial focus would be on those inequalities for which there is established statistical data, which could be drawn from the public administrations of the various member states (or European community institutions), or, alternatively, from university institutions lato sensu.  This should not however prevent us from taking into account alternative approaches including investigations currently developing within the scientific community.
Obviously we can not use statistical data as the primary instrument of investigation without also reflecting on the practical limits and utilisation of statistical analysis itself.. This comparative approach will undoubtedly raise the problem of homogeneity in the statistical data collected in each of the selected countries. We would also have to take into account the institutional and cultural context in which these data have been elaborated.
- Fourthly, as far as organisation is concerned, we propose that a team of limited size, based at MISHA, would oversee the interaction and co-ordination of work made by different national working teams.  This would allow every researcher, laboratory, or institute interested in the project to more readily be involved.  It is hoped that such a team could ensure that similar activities, within the countries that have joined our field of study, would grow in parallel to our own and from there spread outward.  Moreover it is hoped that each team would be multidisciplinary.
Once the teams are put into place we propose to organise in Strasbourg, under the aegis of  MISHA, for the Spring of 2002, a conference which would mark the public commencement of this project to conduct state of the art research into social inequality. 

We hope that this presentation, although still in need of some elaboration, will grab your attention.  This project, as currently presented, is by no means definitive.  Please feel free to add any remarks, comments and critiques, as well as contributing suggestions and proposals for modification.

We look forward to receiving your reactions and we hope that you will be interested in a collaboration with us.  Your replies will permit usrasbourg.

Alain Bihr & Roland Pfefferkorn

Respectively Maître de conférence in Sociology at the University of Haute-Alsace, Laboratoire d’Intelligence des Organisations, Mulhouse and Professeur agrégé de sciences sociales at the University Marc-Bloch, Sociological Laboratory Cultures et sociétés en Europe, UPRESA 7043, Strasbourg, France.