Becoming an unskilled worker in a large enterprise. Young people's choice and local contexts

A major recruitment operation undertaken around the year 2000 by a large automobile manufacturing group in several of its European sites offers the possibility of studying the arrival of young people in unskilled operative posts in different countries. The various national and local contexts in which the recruitments took place played a considerable role in shaping the paths and choices of the young hirees. But beyond this diversity, the recruitments bring out close similarities from one plant and one country to another in terms of the trade-offs the young people wound up making in order to fulfil the objective common to all of them: obtaining a stable job.