Combining unemployment benefit and independent work "Portage salarial" as a way of insuring the self-employed facing intermittent labour

Based on an ethnographic study, this article shows how a form of employment blurring the boundaries between self-employment and wage employment can change the logic and uses of social protection by opening unemployment insurance to a certain category of self-employed workers. This article illustrates how a public insurance can be appropriated by private actors and how workers construe this institution, as an element of their economic model or to make their careers secure.