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ABSTRACT
In France, in the early 2000s, a group of several hundred Maghrebi-born workers engaged in a legal case against their former employer, the national railway company SNCF. For decades, they had been denied the same wages, promotions, retirement pay, and further benefits as their French colleagues. In 2018, they finally won their case at the Paris Court of Appeal, thus setting an important precedent in the struggle against institutional discrimination.
Based on biographical interviews, mainly with SNCF workers from Morocco, this article analyses the structural and biographical conditions for engaging in this political and legal struggle and sheds light on, amongst other things, the importance of transnational dynamics in collective resistance within a postcolonial context. This article thus aims to contribute to the discussion on migrants’ political agency, and how it is hindered or fostered by the different policies of relevant institutions both in the country of residence as well as in the country of origin.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Interestingly, Xavier Vigna (Citation2008) has made out a similar typology in his study of immigrants’ participation in the May–June 68 events in France. As the author pointed out, the fact that a large number of the foreign workers participated in the events by following collective actions initiated by others, without being part of the leaders’ group also corresponded to the engagement of national French workers.
2 The names of all interviewees and of some cities mentioned in this article were pseudonymised, in order to protect their identity.
3 The city of Tanger was declared an international zone in 1923.
4 Even though almost all of the migrant workers recruited by SNCF in the 1970s were men, women made up about 40% of the overall foreign population in France from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Numerous of them came to France in the frame of labour migration (Schor, Citation1996).
5 Over the following years, however, despite repeated demands of certain members of left political parties, successive French governments refused to act in this matter, claiming the railway's independence.
6 The major French unions (CGT, CFDT, CFTC) did not support the migrant railroad workers in their struggle, arguing internally that if SNCF was sentenced to reparation vis a vis the workers, the wages of all employees of SNCF would stagnate for several years. This echoes a phenomenon already observed since the 1970s not only in France but also in other European countries, that unions in some cases have difficulties in taking distance from the idea of ‘nationalist defense’, which can lead to ‘national preference’ (Gallissot, Pitti & Poinsot, Citation2006, p. 100).
7 The Conseil d’État acts as the ‘Supreme court’ for administrative justice.
8 This union has often been described as being ‘reformist’, contrary to more left-leaning unions such as the CGT which are often described as more ‘dissenting’ or ‘revolutionary’.
9 Cédric commented that throughout his life, other Moroccans often assumed he was Jewish, because his family name sounded like a Jewish name. However, his family is Muslim. Originally, Cédric had an Arabic sounding first name. When he applied for French citizenship in 1985 and received a positive answer from the prefecture in 1986, the acceptance letter of the prefecture suggested him to take a French sounding first name and made several proposals. Cédric picked one of them. As he took distance from the ongoing politics in his country of origin, he saw his new name as a new start in France.
10 Pieds–Noirs were persons of French or European origin who were born in Algeria during the period of French colonisation from 1830 to 1962. Most of them, about 1 million, fled to mainland France in the months that followed the Algerian independence in July 1962. The French government had not anticipated that such a high number would leave. The same year, about 18,000 Pieds–Noirs were resettled in rural Corsica through a French national resettlement program (Ramsay, Citation1983).
11 The AMF did not have a legal associative status from the start, as foreigners were not allowed to create associations in France until 1981.
12 In 1922, Abdelkrim founded the Rif Republic, the first anti-colonial nationalist project on the African continent. Until today, he is seen as a Moroccan national hero.