Hiring and firing people in France is particularly hard. Most companies do not scale beyond 10 employees as after this threshold the regulatory burden increases dramatically. Taxes on small to medium businesses are downright confiscatory. Most French people still see business owners as exploiters of their workers.
I wonder how big the contractor market is in France. I mean, contractors are easy to hire and fire so it could be a good compromise (at least in the short term).
The current trend is to externalize ALL the computer-related work, which is crazy as in the companies I've worked at, we (contractors) were in charge of the "crown jewels" of the company; without us, nothing would have worked. Nothing. So, yes, we are easier to fire (by simply stopping a contract), but our knowledge is lost, so the productivity takes a HUGE hit everytime (and don't ask me about documentation or knowledge transfer, those are considered a loss of time by the management!)
There are laws against it, to prevent the "disguised worker" phenomenon, but those laws are useless and ignored or there are work-arounds. The truth is, when you stay for more than 3 years in the same job (like I did), it's obvious that you ARE acting as a regular salaried worker.
Nowadays, it's much more difficult to find a job at a company than it was 20 years ago (or more). Consulting/contracting companies have replaced all those workers. with HUGE negative consequences on productivity, loyalty & workers' attitude.
In the -big- telecom companies I've worked at, as a contractor, you had 50% to 80% of contractors in the teams!
About 15 years ago, I worked in a BIG telecom company, who stopped ALL their contracts before the end of the year (to have numbers that looked "good"). All activity ground to a halt, because the people who "did stuff" were the contractors. Nothing was done during the 3 months period it took to rehire (mostly the same people). Salaried coworkers who were there during that period told me that the corridors were empty, and that it felt really weird to come and work in mostly empty buildings... Of course, they lost many people who had started other contracts. A smaller company would probably have gone bankrupt.