No employment contract, no pay slip, no insurance in the event of work-related accidents: many people work without papers on the Olympic construction sites in Paris. They have been protesting for weeks – with success.
Trade unionists and a dozen immigrant workers have gathered in front of the “Porte de la Chapelle” arena, a multifunctional hall in the north of Paris. “Papers for all workers,” they shout.
It is one of the largest construction sites for the 2024 Olympic Games. Painters, bricklayers and roofers work here – most of them without papers. They want unions to help them work legally.
View of Regularization
After a few hours, Etienne Deschamps, one of the negotiators for the CNT union, takes out a megaphone and announces what sounds like a victory: “We believe that we have negotiated a satisfactory, if not very satisfactory, agreement: for all those affected Regularization procedures will be opened.”
The 32-year-old Bakary from Mali hopes that he too will receive papers at the end of such a procedure. He came to France in 2018 and looked for jobs in the south of the country. But he has been on the Olympic construction sites for a few months now – with someone else’s papers:
When I came here I asked a friend: Can you lend me your papers? I then went to a temporary employment agency and found work that way. I’m working, but the papers are his. And he gets the money too. Sometimes he gives me the money I work for, but sometimes he doesn’t.
“Everyone closes their eyes to it”
Bakary is not an isolated case. Anzoumane Sissoko knows this from his own experience. He coordinates an association that takes care of people without papers. “If one of the workers shows a Spanish or Portuguese ID, the subcontractors don’t check whether it’s really their own documents,” he says. “They think he’s a European citizen and hire him. But the worker knows that at some point things can’t go on like this – that at some point they’ll need real papers.”
In order to work legally, the foreign worker needs a specific form from his employer. But many people don’t disclose this, says union lawyer Vivien Motte. “The employer is obliged to check the worker’s status with the prefecture, but many don’t do that. They don’t want to be accountable to anyone, at a legal level.”
There is a public client called SOLIDEO for the Olympic Games. But things are not that simple. “The big clients hire small subcontractors. They are the ones who employ illegal workers,” explains Parisian local politician Laurent Sorel. “And everyone turns a blind eye to it. The big companies look the other way, the city of Paris looks the other way. And now, with this strike, they are forced to see what they didn’t want to see.”
Paris City Hall conveyed
The union’s plan to make the problems visible has worked. Because the Olympic Games are about a lot of money and prestige. That’s why there should be a solution for the workers on the Olympic construction sites and perhaps also for other industries. The Paris City Hall reacted quickly and is now mediating between employers and the prefecture. This ultimately decides whether a worker gets papers.
The new immigration law would be helpful. This will be debated in France in the next few weeks, including a clause about papers for illegal workers in shortage professions. Bakary also dreams of them at the Olympic construction site in the north of Paris.