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L’idée que le travailleur doit s’adapter au progrès technique est admise par tous. Pourtant les coûts d’adaptation au progrès technique ne sont que rarement une variable explicite de l’analyse. L’article cherche à les y introduire et analyse en conséquence le travail sous sa double dimension: produire des biens et services mais aussi acquérir les nouvelles qualifications requises par le progrès technique. Dans cette perspective, on propose, comme mesure de l’efficacité globale du travail, le critère nouveau de valorité différentielle qu’on applique aux problèmes de sélection des travailleurs.

Labour, technological change, differential value creation the workers’selection issue It is acknowledged that the worker should adapt himself to changes induced by technical progress. Nevertheless, the costs incurred by the firm, related to this adaptative behavior are scarcely taken into account by economic theory. The purpose of this article is to introduce these costs explicitly. As a consequence, work activity presents two faces : the worker is expected altogether to produce goods and services and to acquire the new required skills linked to technical and organisational changes. According to this view, this article proposes the concept of differential value creation as a synthetic way of measuring the comparative efficiency of the worker with regard the capacity to adapt and the production activity. This concept is used to examine the decisions on the type of workers to hire.