Labour hoarding in the French manufacturing sector: an analysis through firm’s responses to the business outlook surveys[Un portrait de la rétention de main-d'oeuvre dans l'industrie française : analyse à partir des enquêtes mensuelles de conjoncture]

Building on a European Commission study (Hristov and Thum-Thysen, 2021a) and using the French business outlook surveys, this article proposes a new firm-level monthly labour hoarding indicator. This indicator enables us to study the labour hoarding behaviour of French industrial firms from 2004 to 2021. Over that period, at least one in ten industrial workers find themselves in a firm that is hoarding its labour. This share increases during crises, particularly during the 2020 health crisis where it reaches one in two workers. This share is volatile in the transport equipment sector, but does not vary much in the agri-food sector. Small firms stand out from the others in two ways : they are over-represented among firms that never hoard their labour, as well as among firms that hoard the most. Firms whose production is limited by a lack of workers or equipment are less affected by labour hoarding, whereas firms whose production is limited by a lack of orders hoard their labour most often. Finally, the analysis of firms' actual activity and employment evolutions during their hoarding periods shows that more than half of firms decrease their workforce while hoarding labour, but that these decreases are smaller than those of firms that could have hoarded their labour but did not.