First, territorial fragmentation. The distances between the places where people work and the places where they live are growing. In 1975, the average commuting distance in France was 20 kilometres. Today it is forty.
Second, the fragmentation of work. The service economy, just in time management and lean production have led to changes in working hours. The result is that a growing number of employees do temporary work or part-time work, unsocial hours, split days, whilst others work at night or at weekends.

The combination of these two changes creates problems for both employees and employers.

People of working age have to organise their day-to-day lives in such a way that they can find and keep a job that suits them. They have to find a childcare system that matches their working hours, avoid traffic jams in order to get to work on time and feeling fit, but also be ready to move when their employer does.

Companies are also affected. Real estate costs force them to move away from the cheaper suburbs. But how do they attract and retain workers? How can a company perform well when its staff have to drive three hours to get to work?
How do you manage the situation of a mother who has to juggle childcare and work? The complexity of workers’ day today lives affects company performance.

These mismatches between employment supply and demand are found in all economic sectors. The service and retail sectors are short of managers but find it hard to attract young women because of the inadequacy of childcare services. The building trades, human services, hotels and catering, logistics and industrial cleaning, large retail, temporary employment in all its diversity – all these sectors are under great stress and unable to recruit and retain staff, because workplaces are distant and fragmented, because petrol is expensive, because public transport is not designed for inter-suburban commuting, because property prices make it impossible for low paid workers to move.

Our aim is to examine problems that are usually approached separately, as a single subject. Travel to work is a long identified problem. In 1975, France’s Carte Orange was introduced to resolve these problems of access to work… but they remain unresolved, because of changes in business geography, the limitations of public transport, the rising cost of car ownership…
Residential mobility is an emerging problem. Real estate prices, whether for rent or purchase, are so high that a significant section of the working population is unable to live near a workplace or to follow a company when it moves. Existing childcare arrangements are both unsuitable and completely inadequate. In certain cities, you have to reserve a place in a creche two years before... the child is conceived. How can you work when the creche closes at 6 p.m. – not 6:05 p.m. – and parents who are late three times run the risk of having the service removed?

In the lives of working people, these factors are not separate but closely interconnected. In the working population, individuals are constantly obliged to juggle between these three aspects of a single problem, the problem of changing lifestyles.