Droits et conditions de travail des employés des agences de location de main-d'oeuvre

Un contexte économique difficile, des besoins de ressources humaines de plus en plus flexibles et une offre accrue de main-d’œuvre ont contribué à l'émergence de nouvelles formes d'emploi à temps partiel ou temporaire, souvent comblées par des agences de location de main-d’œuvre temporaire. Cet article cherche à présenter les conséquences pratiques qu'entraîne une relation d'emploi tripartite, employeur/salarié/agence, sur les droits et les conditions de travail des employés des agences de location de main-d’œuvre temporaire.Over the last fifteen years, we have witnessed the growth of various "atypical" forms of employment and a growing interest in part-time work, piecework and subcontracting. This trand has given rise to two very different types of employment on the labour market: regular and permanent jobs versus part-time or temporary jobs. The latter often include contract employees from employment agencies hired on a temporary basis. A firm dealing with such agencies avoids the cost of hiring regular workers and benefits from greater flexibility as far as personnel management is concerned. Our labour laws are conceived and administered on the assumption that there is a bilateral agreement between employer and employee, in a stable job environment. This two-party relationship has an impact on collective and individual working relations. The distinctive criterion of this working relationship is, as determined by doctrine and jurisprudence, legal subordination, which can be defined as the right to manage, control and correct the activities of another person. But does this criterion apply to a three-party relationship?The notion of legal subordination is always useful to determine who the employer is. However, the procedure used in order to decide who exercises authority is based on increasingly flexible criteria. In the light of trends in jurisprudence, Blouin (1995) suggests that legal subordination can be determined be referring to either criteria or factors, and the method used depends upon the type of relation between the parties. In the scope of the proposed analysis, the following tests are used: the control test; the work organization test; the economie activity test; the fourfold test; and variable factors.In this article, we observe that in cases where the definition of the relationship between employer and employee was problematic, in the context of private placement agencies, the legal subordination criterion prevalled, that is, the firms dealing with those agencies were mainly identified as the employer. The authors consider that, in a three-party relationship, the efficiency test is much too strict and overlooks some fundamental aspects of the question. It is suggested that criteria such as recruitment, selection, dally supervision, compensation, equipaient ownership, task assignment, work scheduling, training, work evaluation, discipline, dismissal, length of service, integration in the firm and legal subordination should be looked at more closely by the courts in their search for the genuine employer.Un contexte económico difìcil, la necesidad de recursos humanos cada vez mas flexibles y una oferta creciente de mano de obra han contribuido al surgimiento de nuevas formas de empleo de medio tiempo o temporal, seguido estos puestos son cubiertos por agencias de mano temporal. Este articulo busca presentar las consecuencias practicas que estan comprendidas en un forma de empleo tripartita, empresa — empleado — agencia, sobre los derechos y las condiciones de trabajo de los empleados de las agencias de mano de obra temporal

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition)

In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. For example, a key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process versus those that measure fl ux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process including the amount and rate of cargo sequestered and degraded). In particular, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation must be differentiated from stimuli that increase autophagic activity, defi ned as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (inmost higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium ) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the fi eld understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. It is worth emphasizing here that lysosomal digestion is a stage of autophagy and evaluating its competence is a crucial part of the evaluation of autophagic flux, or complete autophagy. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. Along these lines, because of the potential for pleiotropic effects due to blocking autophagy through genetic manipulation it is imperative to delete or knock down more than one autophagy-related gene. In addition, some individual Atg proteins, or groups of proteins, are involved in other cellular pathways so not all Atg proteins can be used as a specific marker for an autophagic process. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field