National origin discrimination or racial discrimination? The mobilization of SNCF’s Moroccan railway workers

ABSTRACT

In 2018, 848 Moroccan railway workers had the French national train company convicted for national origin discrimination. In the French context, this fight and the judicial outcome are remarkable. The absence of class action and the colour blind environment have historically limited mobilization against racial discrimination. This article examines the conditions of this success despite the institutional context. Some peripheral actors tried but failed to impose a racial and post-colonial framing. Only the “national origin discrimination” framework enabled the achievement of the legal case.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• nationality
• mobilization
• law
• colour blind
• immigration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The “labour chamber of the court of appeal” (chambre sociale de la cour d’appel) is the specialist appellate court for disputes relating to private employment. Disputes are considered in terms of civil liability and redress (and not of guilt and conviction as is the case in the criminal courts). The level below the labour chamber of the court of appeal is the industrial tribunal: its particularity is that the judges who sit on it are industrial tribunal judges, elected from trade union, employee and employer lists.

2 The controversy around “ethnic statistics” has reared its head several times in French public debate since the end of the 1990s. The question was last notably raised by Sibeth Ndiaye, then the Government Spokesperson. In June 2020, she proposed reopening the debate regarding the relevance of generating such data at the national statistics level. She came under fire from the overwhelming majority of political actors across the spectrum.

3 We have no reason to believe that this non-invisibilization responds to an intentional judicial strategy, any more than we have observed any injunction from legal professionals to understate the signs referring to a supposed Arabness.

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from Défenseur des Droits.