Abstract EN:

The birth of the opposition on the nature of unemployment took place during the debate of the period between the two world wars. In pigou's and ruef's analyses, unemployment was voluntary due to the working people not accepting wage cuts. For keynes, it was manily an involuntary one, bacause the aggregate demand for goods was too low. During the seventies and the eighties, all the controversial issues have reappeared in modern economic explanations of the high level of unemployment. For the microeconomists, unemployment remains mainly, for differents reasons, a voluntary one. But for the macroeconomists, it results from e general desequilibrium in the economic system. The concrete analysis of the unemployment during the eighties in britanny, through the attitudes of the work force, unemployed or threatened with unemployment leads one to be very doubtful about the voluntary explanation of the unemployment. In fact, if attention is focused on the young and on the female group unemployemnt appeared clearly as an involuntary threat from which they have tried to escape. During those years, the involuntary component of the unemployment has increased regularily and, at the end of that period, the more "voluntary" component has virtually disappeared, the involuntary unemployment remains at a very high level it has become very sticky and hard and more than ever represents a strong threat upon the core of the work force.