Comment appréhender conjointement les changements techniques et les changements du travail en élevage?

Abstract

Labour issues, which are critical today for the farming sector, are mainly discussed by social sciences. Yet livestock sciences do have an important and specific part to play in the design of tools geared to give food for thought: i) technical changes modify the working calendar, priorities between tasks, and the interchangeability between workers; Ii) technical adaptations are levers to solve labour problems. After summarizing the major trends in work organization models since the World War II, this paper introduces the recent contributions of livestock sciences with working model designs taking precisely into account livestock management events and their implications (the Work Assessment method and the "Atelage" model). They are based on three principles: i) all workers are not interchangeable; ii) tasks have different rhythms and postponing characteristics since both workers and tasks can not be easily added as far as the working organisation is concerned; iii) the year is a chain of working periods that first differ in terms of contents, duration of daily tasks (which are mainly daily care of animals in livestock farms but can include the off-farm daily requirements), etc.. Based on the observations made in farms bearing in mind that "work organisation" point of view, this article underlines the importance of the composition of the workforce, of the expectations of a better quality of life, of the combination of non-agricultural, private, and agricultural tasks to accompany the changes occurring in livestock farms.