Analyse d’une zone grise d’emploi en France et au Brésil : les Travailleurs Indépendants Economiquement Dépendants (TIED) : Analysis of a grey zone in France and Brazil: the Economically Dependent SelfEmployed Workers (EDSW)

This article deals with a specific category of workers set in a grey zone between wage-labor and self-employment. Those we refer to as Economically Dependent Self-employed Workers (EDSW) are workers who are legally self-employed but are in fact depending on a single client for most of their income. Using the semi-structured interviews we did in France and Brazil with forty EDSW working in the Information Technology sector, we study the actual condition of these workers in order to locate them on a continuum between disguised wage-labor and real self-employment. After differentiating two EDSW profiles, we focus on the “service providers integrated into the client structure” group, whose emergence answers different logic in France and Brazil. Then, we identify the risks to which these workers are exposed because of their self-employed status, and we analyze the way they try to cope with those risks by negotiating benefits with their client and/or mobilizing individual protection mechanisms.