Employee Voice and Lifelong Education Capabilities: a French-German comparison[Formation tout au long de la vie et capacité d’agir des salarié·es. Une comparaison franco-allemande]

Based on a study of employees' voices in decisions impinging on lifelong education, the article shows the utility of making individual voice an object of investigation in the same way as the collective voice upon which sociological research usually focuses. Concentrating on qualified assembly-line workers and professional-development schemes that allow for upward mobility out of the assembly line, the paper uses a multi-level approach to compare the practices of two subsidiaries of a multinational firm from the aeronautics sector, one located in Germany and the other in France. Despite co-determination bodies that give employees a stronger collective voice in the German production unit, the workers capability to make their voices heard within the organization in matters of social-promotion training would appear to be weaker than in the French unit. In order to explain this unexpected result, we revisit the thesis of the "societal effect" and investigate the close interrelationship between the modalities of individual voice and the regimes of responsibility-sharing between public institutions, companies and employees. To this end, we distinguish between two modalities of voice: a weak version that allows employees to have a say and express their preferences, and a strong version that supports people's capability to act and helps to influence their achievements.