PARIS — “Without exploiting us, the Olympic Village would not have been built on time,” declares Cheickna Sarambounou, 40. “Paris would not have been able to host the Olympic Games at this cost without us.”
An undocumented migrant from Mali, Sarambounou has lived in France for years, and works in construction. He says he has been forced to work “outside” French labor laws, depriving him of workers’ rights. All while he and thousands of others like him helped to build the infrastructure for Paris’s upcoming Olympic Games.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Sarambounou has shared his experience with Daraj.
“In April 2022, I began working on the renovation of the Pleyel Tower, which is being transformed into a hotel to host Olympic visitors. I did not sign any contract, so I was working under the table for 80 euros per day. My official shift was from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. but I often worked overtime and stayed as late as 11 p.m. Those extra hours were not paid. I did not receive any of the benefits that are common in France, such as transportation and food allowances. And of course I did not have any paid time off,” he said, adding that he paid for his own personal protective equipment, including his helmet and work shoes.
“If I had legal residency in France, the site manager would not have dared hire me without a contract and then exploit me. But my need to work put me in a vulnerable position,” Sarambounou said.
Underpaid and with no benefits
Sarambounou’s daily wage of 80 euros () is equal to French minimum wage. But on days he worked overtime until 11 p.m., he should have earned 140 euros (3). That is a big difference for a low-wage worker, living in an expensive capital city and supporting a family back home in Mali.
Rights violations also took other forms, Sarambounou says, “I had a work injury that forced me to stay at home for a whole week. The employer did not count this week, and I did not receive any compensation from health insurance.”
Because Sarambounou does not have an official paycheck, he does not make the monthly health insurance contributions that would allow him to benefit from such compensation. The same is true for pension contributions, meaning he will also be deprived of a pension.
Sub-contracting allows commanding companies to escape responsibility.
Sarambounou said the working conditions at the Pleyel Tower in Saint Denis, a suburb north of Paris, are no different than those he experienced on other construction sites since he began working in the sector in 2019.
Investigative reports and inspections by regulatory agencies have found that Sarambounou’s was not an isolated case. French labor inspectors (URACTI) found in a March 2022 control that one in six workers at an Olympic site were undocumented foreign workers, FranceInfo reports. URACTI figures show that most of such workers are African migrants who are vulnerable to various types of exploitation.
Subcontracting for profit
Yet their exploitation would not have been possible without subcontracting and external contracting, common practices in the construction sector that have been used in Paris’s Olympic preparations. SOLIDEO, the government body responsible for building and renovating Olympic infrastructure, contracted with commanding companies, which then delegated projects to smaller firm. The Pleyel Tower, for example, was handed over to GCC Group, which delegated it to a smaller French-Turkish company.
Large construction companies stopped employing workers directly many years ago, said Jean-Albert Guidou of the CGT trade union. He notes that construction workers are more vulnerable than others to work-related accidents.
“The more injuries, the higher the fees the company must pay. Commanding companies resort to sub-contracting to lower their financial obligations,” he said.
The logic of austerity applies to the implementing companies, which Guidou employ undocumented migrants to blackmail them and bargain with them over their rights. By employing illegal migrants, companies can avoid up to half of their financial obligations stated under an official job contract.
The company did not write beneficiary’s name on the check so that I could put someone else’s to cash it.
Sub-contracting also allows commanding companies to escape responsibility; it is easier for them to blame executing companies for employing undocumented migrants. Commanding companies, including Eiffage and Spie Batignolles, used this strategy in their responses to media outlets. Yet Guidou said that delegating to other smaller companies does not spare commanding companies from responsibility.
In Sarambounou’s case, he was not in contact with any GCC Group administrators or engineers; his ties were limited to the executing company.
“The workshop manager asked for an ID card, not to confirm my legal status, but to issue a badge to enter the site. I sent him via WhatsApp a photo of a residence card belonging to one of my relatives who is legally residing in France. He didn’t ask to see the original card, as the law requires, and just wrote down the information,” said Sarambounou, who was issued a badge under his relative’s name.
Further proof that the construction company knew it was violating the law Sarambounou says is that he received his salary either in cash or a bank check. “The company did not write beneficiary’s name on the check so that I could put someone else’s name to cash it for me,” he said.
The French model
Subcontracting mechanism and its violations are no secret, but the Paris 2024 Games have drawn attention to them. The organizing authorities had pledged to make these Olympics a mirror of the “French model.” Accordingly, their official logo was modeled after the “Phrygian” hat, a symbol of the French Revolution, referencing the country’s history of liberty, equality, fraternity and human rights.
Trade unions, employers’ unions, the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, SOLIDEO, and Paris’s mayor all signed a social pact promising to respect labor laws and avoid discrimination against workers, which was widely marketed as an aspects of the French model. Yet Sarambounou and Guidou say that this pact — and the message France aimed to deliver to the world — have been undermined.
“Companies are redoubling their efforts to meet delivery dates, which means doubling overtime hours. Therefore, the level of exploitation increased,” Guidou said.
While he said controversy over Qatar’s abuse of migrant workers for the 2022 World Cup helped shed light on the situation in Paris, Guidou was cautious in his comparison between the two; unlike in Qatar, no deaths were reported in Paris. Moreover, French society supports workers rights — something Qatari society lacks. “Yet the two models share a logic of foreign workers’ vulnerability and exploitation,” he said.
For sociologists Vincent Geyser and Nyando Touré, the exploitation of this category of workers had the French state’s implicit approval — a conclusion Guidou agrees with: “For about 20 years, the French state has been abandoning its responsibilities. This is evident, for example, in the decline in the resources for regulatory agencies, which gives companies the freedom to act without regard for the law.”
Ali Tolu, a CGT construction delegate, also notes a shortage of labor ministry inspectors, saying “each inspector is now required to monitor 1,000 sites annually in Paris and its suburbs, while the administrative tasks, such as report writing and auditing company records, as well as field trips, do not allow an inspector to monitor more than 200 sites each year.”
SOLIDEO did not respond to requests for comment, but has said in previous statements it has intensified monitoring networks of employing undocumented foreign workers. It also said it filed a court complaint in June 2022 against one of the companies.
Is inspection the solution?
Intensifying inspection is not necessarily in workers’ best interest, Sarambounou said, citing a surprise inspection seven months after he began working in the Pleyel Tower. The managers were taken off guard and didn’t “warn us to run away as usual,” he said. After the inspection, he was fired without compensation.
“That’s when I decided that I had to work to regularize my legal situation, no matter what the risk,” he said.
In an interview Le Parisien newspaper on Nov. 20, 2021, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin estimated there are 600,000 to 700,000 illegal immigrants in France. Meanwhile, Guidou said the to CGT estimates that 80% of illegal immigrants are professionally active; therefore “it is only fair to regularize their legal status, which would make them less vulnerable to exploitation,” he said.
Foreigners have become scapegoats for the purpose of absorbing popular discontent.
Grégoire Hervet, a labor law and immigration lawyer, said laws on immigration are subject to political considerations and the government’s ability to confront public opinion and opposition parties. The Darmanin law on immigration, adopted in January 2024, allows the regularization of undocumented workers who meet certain conditions (residing in France for more than three years, working for 12 consecutive months in a sector facing labor shortages).
The construction sector, where foreigners make up 27% of all workers, according to a September 2021 study by the French labor ministry, is one of the most concerned sectors.
Legislative contradiction
Hervet points to a legislative contradiction: On the one hand, employers cannot hire foreign workers who do not have legal residency, which deters some employers from signing contracts with them and opens their appetite for exploitation. On the other hand, undocumented workers seeking to regularize their legal status need proof, such as a contract, that they work (in a sector suffering from labor shortages). He said there is a lack of political will to resolve this contradiction, which is compounded by French bureaucracy and administrative complexities.
The CGT’s Guidou does not look favorably on legislative and administrative mechanisms. He said he was able to regularize 10 workers on Olympic sites, including Sarambounou, thanks to political pressure. “That pressure would not have been possible without the current media spotlight on the Paris Olympics,” he said.
In an interview with Le Figaro in November 2023, Patrick Martin, president of France’s most prominent employers’ union MEDEF, emphasized the country’s need to recruit foreign labor as well as the need to clarify laws. So why is domestic discourse so hostile?
Guidou and Hervet said politics are hindering a pragmatic solution. “Foreigners have become scapegoats for the purpose of absorbing popular discontent,” Guidou said.
