Abstract
This paper examines the historical process by which salaried employment formed in France, in order to consider the tendencies of contemporary capitalism, which can be characterized by the generalization and precarization of salaried employment. To focus on its characteristics from a historical and theoretical point of view, the main issues addressed in the paper are as follows. 1) How the salarization of work realized social mobility inside the société salariale with the help of Social Security in the latter half of the 20^<th> century, which paradoxically presages the precarization of life and labor today, in the sense that workers are made immobile and stagnant in the homogeneous social space without help from strong primary communities. 2) How the genesis of the contrat de travail in late 19^<th> and early 20^<th> century France led to problematic changes in salaried work, especially labor relations (subordination of the employee to the employer) and the combination of effort, time, and reward (diagram of "abstract labor" according to Marx). 3) How salaried employment is, in contemporary society, so to speak, "commercialized" and/or "domesticated", in other words irregularized as industrial capitalism has declined, promoting the service industry (from domestic service to creative and knowledge work), in the sense that the service industry requires a radically different management, communication and staff maintenance model, and that abstract labor is divided into heterogeneous kinds of tasks and relations.
