Insee Première · February 2022 · n° 1894

Management of employees within industrial groups: heterogeneous practices depending on subsidiaries.

Among the 2 million employees of industrial groups in 2019, one in five belonged to a non-industrial subsidiary (trade or service). Among the latter, 56% were covered by a sector-based collective agreement of industrial type. For a given industrial group, the more specialised the non-industrial subsidiary and the stronger its link to the industrial subsidiaries, the more likely it was to apply an industrial-type collective agreement. And all the more so the higher the proportion of managers employed in the subsidiary. These industrial-type collective agreements generally granted more advantageous wage provisions: their generalisation to the positions of the whole trade and service subsidiaries belonging to an industrial group would have resulted in 9% increase of the average minimum wage scale for those positions. The actual wages in these trade or service subsidiaries were higher than those otherwise paid in trade and service companies.