Time for activism: union careers and biographical availability of CFDT women and men.

Summary In France, the unionization rate in 2017 is estimated to be around 11%. Among all members, women represent 36%. While we are witnessing a relative feminization of the union fabric under the impetus of the "women's cause space", women are still underrepresented, both at the bottom of the hierarchy among members, at intermediate levels among workplace activists, and in executive positions in union organizations. Although women have massively invested the salaried labor market since the end of World War II, unions have long been reluctant to open up to women, oscillating between proclaiming their right to work and sending them back to the home.To understand the permanence of this observation, the thesis proposes to study the construction of union careers in the light of the question of the articulation of the life spheres of CFDT activists. Through the notion of biographical availability, which refers to a relative absence of biographical constraints (family, professional, financial, etc.) and which tends to make activism time-consuming and/or risky, the thesis invites us to take seriously the temporal dimension in the process of manufacturing union commitment and its inequalities within France's leading union.This thesis is based first of all on documentary research from the CFDT's confederal archives. From the study of leaflets, femininity and masculinity, like mobile cursors, allow us to approach the relationship of the union organization to the cause of women in a historical way. It is then based on a corpus of 40 biographical interviews of CFDT activists conducted in each stratum of the organization: by a professional and sectoral axis on the one hand, and interprofessional and territorial on the other. Finally, it is based on the creation of a new national statistical survey: the EPASY survey, which retrospectively and jointly retraces the professional, intimate and trade union dimensions of 1115 CFDT activists. This research first highlights the weight of biographical availability in the construction of militant careers in union space and time. Depending on certain professional and family configurations, union careers accelerate or slow down. Union involvement and its level are more or less facilitated. But this biographical availability is the place of inequalities according to the gender and the class of belonging of the activists, in particular according to the level of economic, cultural and activist resources.