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Paper short abstract

In France, various life-course crises have led to urban-to-rural migration that in turn have escorted relatively individualised forms of labour revaluation. Yet, the radicality of the revaluation(s) remains curtailed by the larger economic crisis and state policy.

Paper long abstract

Diois is a rural area in France that attracts intra-country immigration animated by a wish for a "better life." Many of the newcomers see it primarily as a "life project" and only secondarily as an "economic project." A significant portion of them depend on RSA, a type of guaranteed minimum income. Locally it is variously judged in the spectrum from parasitism to dignified renumeration as an incipient form of base revenue, which at times confronts the intentions of the state that had designed it as a reinsertion tool. Importantly, on an economic plain, in order to make living the income often needs to be supplemented with labour that has been valued otherwise - outside of traditional workplace and “the market." The options vary from activity in absolutely informal networks, to activity in a LETS, an hour bank, one of the many associations, or a tentative to create a complementary currency that would create a bridge with the "real economy." The diversity of overlapping, competing and/or complementary informal-to-formal approaches and scales of action reveal the legal and economic difficulties for both revaluing labor outside of formal workplace and succeeding to procure livelihood.