The biggest concerns of equestrian stakeholders in France
As human needs, associated policies and available techniques have evolved, the equine sector has been built, without really structuring itself, more or less accommodating state supervision that has been gradually called into question. This sector is nevertheless a source of jobs, secondary activities and significant leisure activities. A link between tradition and modernity, cities and countryside, pleasure and performance, it brings together a wide variety of players, sometimes opposed, but generally driven by the same passion for horses. In this article, we discuss the main concerns felt by players in the equestrian sector.
Job instability, a burden for employees and employers
The equine sector represents a source of significant employment, particularly in agriculture, characterised by a certain precariousness and a high turnover which particularly affects young people, 48% of whom leave their position after one year of activity. This can partly be explained by a disenchantment with discovering a professional activity chosen from the experience of the amateur or recreational rider.
Employers recognize that jobs involving horses often have difficult working conditions, low wages, and schedules that are sometimes incompatible with family life if efforts to organize work are not offered. These elements can cause great disappointment among young employees who are primarily motivated by their passion for and contact with horses. On the company's side, the renewal of these employees represents a significant economic cost.
Beyond that, all this is a brake on the professionalization of employees who do not accumulate enough experience to become specialists in their field. Added to these questions are those relating to the status of employees, which had improved thanks to the reduction in VAT in 2005. Today, 56% of employees, and particularly women, are still on precarious contracts and some professional actors fear that the increase in VAT will exacerbate this situation, particularly in a context where it seems difficult to envisage the impact of this increase on the prices charged to consumers.
Furthermore, the significant weight of volunteers and amateurs compared to professionals, combined with the ambiguity regarding professional status, means that some of the players are not specifically trained for these professions. In addition, the training is not always adapted, the level at which training is started is often problematic and some professions do not have specific training to enable young people to prepare for working life. This creates a mismatch between the skills of candidates and those expected by employers who sometimes find themselves forced to choose their horses' accessories themselves on La Sellerie Française .
Professionalism in question
A recurring debate within the sector pits "professionals" against "amateurs", each with their own definition of the one or the other category. Thus, breeders who define themselves as "professionals" by the fact that they try to make a living from their activity, accuse the others of exercising unfair competition and find it illegitimate that they receive state aid when their activity is a hobby. They also criticize them for having taken power within professional associations when their approach to breeding is too far removed from economic reality and they do not compensate for this with a scientific culture capable of providing more in terms of selection programs, for example.
Other stakeholders nevertheless believe that it is not possible to associate professionalism with a business status, or that there are too few truly professional breeders to make a distinction, knowing that the sector also functions largely thanks to the importance of "amateur" breeders. Finally, there are those who think that the compromise would be support for businesses rather than breeders, an effort to promote young workers so that they take on responsibilities and an allocation of bonuses according to eligibility criteria that correspond to a policy, objectives and not a status.
These difficulties in differentiating between professional and amateur breeders contribute to the great opacity of the French saddle horse market which, just like the "recycling" of racehorses and sport horses towards leisure riding, harms the development of real outlets for both leisure and high-level horses and therefore for breeders. This question of professionalism can also arise for high-level riders, who, on a financial level, cannot live from competition and must combine it with another activity.