After Accusing Qatar, This is How Paris Olympics 2024 Revealed France’s Hypocrisy and Illegal Abuse of Migrant Labor

Before launching Qatar World Cup 2022, Western media did not stop calls to boycott the event, claiming Qatar should not host the World Cup due to alleged human rights violations. Now, the ball bounced back to Paris after it was revealed that the European country was facing accusations of violating workers’ rights.

On January 5, 2023, a press investigation published by the Liberation French newspaper led to a scandal of massive violations by French companies against migrant workers working in the facilities of the Olympic Games (Paris 2024).

The investigation focused on the “exploitation” of foreign workers who illegally came to France (immigrants) in the projects of the 2024 Paris Olympics facilities. They are assigned hard work causing the death of some of them; in return, they are given small sums that do not meet their needs.

 

Worker Abuses

Liberation quoted African workers from Mali as working on a construction project for the Paris Olympics for “long days with little pay.” It also exposed France’s exploitation of those workers as they work “without a permit,” although it is a situation that happens all over the world.

“I accepted it because of my status (without official residence). If you don’t have papers, you have to accept hard work and all the lousy jobs, you have no other choice,” said one worker.

He added: “Everyone knows what is going on, but no one talks about it. Despite this, we were expelled without any rights if the immigration police came to the place.”

Trade unionist Bernard Thibault, who co-chairs the Paris Social Pact Monitoring Committee 2024, commented on the allegations by saying that this is hypocritical.

Another worker (Musa), who also asked not to be identified for security reasons, said: “We are doing this for the sake of the family in Mali, which we support [financially], and we make all sacrifices to do so.”

He added: “All these beautiful stadiums were built by poor people, exploited people.”

Musa explains: The French do not want to do this work, so they only bring foreigners, Pakistanis for electricity, Arabs for plumbing, and Afghans for construction, while the white French sit in the offices.

Other workers, one of them called Abdo, complained to the Liberation newspaper, saying: “We have no rights, no work clothes, no safety shoes, we have no right to medical examinations, and if one of us gets sick or injured, he will be replaced the next day.”

The newspaper indicated that the first discovery of the exploitation of irregular migrant workers dates back to May 2022, when a group of 12 immigrants from Mali decided to file a complaint with the French General Confederation of Labor, asking for support to defend themselves against their exploiters.

French and African newspapers pointed out that Paris exploited African workers from the country that was colonizing it to carry out construction work with nominal wages within a dangerous and enslaving work environment.

Many illegal workers complained of mistreatment, exploitation, and hard labor for little pay and demanded regularization, according to what was published by the AFP on January 20, 2022.

The employment and the exploitation of illegal immigrants without work permits in the Paris Olympic Games construction raise political and social tension, according to AFP.

Immediately after the scandal bubbled on the surface, several French and foreign newspapers published reports about the crimes committed by France against workers, hinting that it had previously criticized Qatar’s organization of the World Cup, claiming to defend the rights of World Cup workers, and now it is doing the same.

Le Monde referred to the same scandal and crimes committed against African workers and illegal immigrants in a report published on December 7, 2022.

It published testimonies of unregistered migrant workers at the Olympic Games infrastructure construction areas, revealing exploitation and abuse of those workers by employing them in conditions that lack legal and humane conditions.

In its investigation, the newspaper met ten Malian citizens who reside illegally in France and are employed by a contracting company working on projects for the Paris Olympics.

Workers from Mali, which was occupied by France, also talked about assigning them to excavation and construction tasks without work contracts, permits, or residence papers.

Le Monde also mentioned these workers perform hard work, such as carrying some bags of cement weighing tens of kilograms to climb 13 floors, while others specialized in building reinforced concrete.

The investigation showed that these workers do not enjoy any social and legal security, as they work for a little more than 80 euros per day without permission and without a day off.

On March 15, 2022, a report by L’Humanite revealed that three fatal accidents and dozens of serious accidents in construction areas in the Ile-de-France region had occurred in recent weeks.

The newspaper said that the accumulation of construction work in Paris increases the possibility of fatal accidents, resulting even in daily death in France. The dead workers are often without names and remain unknown because of their forged work papers.

Activists said that what France claimed happened to the workers in Doha is actually happening to these workers in Paris, so why did the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, call for a boycott of the Qatar World Cup when she did not come out with a statement about the violation of the rights of workers in Paris, while they are a stone’s throw away from her office?

In October 2022, less than two months before the start of the FIFA World Cup in Doha, there were more and more calls in France to boycott it, and they were led by Anne Hidalgo.

She said: “The city of Paris will not install giant screens or fan zones in the streets to protest against the holding of the World Cup in a country with an unsuitable [hot] climate and where migrant workers are killed on construction sites.”

French jurist Francois Deroche, head of Rights and Justice Without Borders, described the decision of the then-mayor of Paris to boycott the 2022 World Cup in Qatar under the pretext of violating workers’ rights as “a kind of hypocrisy and tantamount to political trading.”

He asked, in statements to Al-Jazeera Mubasher on October 30, 2022: “Where was the mayor of Paris in 2018 when the World Cup was organized in Russia, while the latter was bombing Syria with bombs?”

 

Double Standards

This comes at a time when France and most Western countries continue to talk about abuses against workers who built World Cup facilities in Qatar, particularly about the fate of some migrant workers who died on construction sites, according to Amnesty International.

Following the enslavement scandal of illegal African immigrants in the construction of the facilities for the Paris Olympics, campaigns started to emerge on some sidewalks in the vital streets of the French capital, especially near the municipal building, to denounce the double standards of the Paris municipality in dealing with the Qatar World Cup.

Activists behind this campaign criticizing the Paris municipality wrote: “Total boycott for workers’ rights” and “Boycott Lafarge for funding ISIS in Syria.”

In October 2022, an American court ruled that the French company, Lafarge, be fined $777.8 million after accusing it of financing the organization and paying sums of money to the al-Nusra Front in exchange for permission to establish a cement factory in Syria.

The French criticized what they called “modern slavery” in their country and the illegal exploitation of people for personal or commercial gain.

This term covers a wide range of abuses and exploitation, including forced labor and unpaid work. These are two things that stand out clearly in the case of informal workers at the Olympic Games sites in Paris, as well as hundreds of other workers with similar conditions.

Le Monde newspaper says that the estimates of the French Ministry of the Interior confirmed the presence of between 600 and 700 thousand irregular immigrants in the country, most of them from the Maghreb countries and sub-Saharan Africa.

A large sector of them is being exploited in this type of illegal work, under harsh conditions and with low wages.

On December 2, 2022, a report was issued by the United Nations, stating that racial discrimination in France has become an urgent concern.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination confirmed the persistence of racist and discriminatory discourse in France, particularly in the media and on the Internet.

The periodic review of France’s policy towards minorities, issued by 18 independent experts, stated that there is concern about the racist political discourse adopted by political leaders, especially “immigrants, Africans, and people of Arab descent.”

At a time when the French and Western media took advantage of the “Qatar World Cup workers” incident to launch a hostile campaign against Doha’s hosting of this big event, the European media did not care much about the exploitation of workers in the Paris Olympics.

In conjunction with the Olympics workers scandal, a report by the Politico website on January 17, 2023, revealed French plans to intensify monitoring the French people and visitors to the Olympics through a series of surveillance cameras.

It explained that France plans to increase the monitoring force in the 2024 Paris Olympics by significantly expanding its arsenal of monitoring powers and tools to secure the millions of tourists expected to participate in the Olympic Games.

The funny thing is that the organizing committee for the Paris Olympics confirmed that it had installed cameras and monitoring devices at work sites to detect the exploitation of workers, but the testimonies collected by French newspapers undermine and refute these assertions.

Among France’s plans to monitor Olympic guests are large-scale camera systems backed by an algorithm to detect suspicious behavior, including unattended baggage and disturbing crowd movements such as stampedes.

Senators will vote on legislation supporting authorities’ implementation of this supposedly temporary surveillance, including allowing controversial facial recognition technology.

Politico says the stakes are high, as the government claims it desperately wants to avoid security failures such as those that damaged its reputation during the 2022 Champions League final and the trauma of the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

However, the plans are causing an uproar among privacy advocates. Bastien Le Querrec of the digital rights NGO La Quadrature fears the Olympics will be used as a pretext to pass security checks that restrict freedoms.

The French government had previously backed down from deploying facial recognition technology after lawmakers within President Emmanuel Macron’s majority party raised human rights concerns.

It has also been forced by the country’s data protection authority and the Supreme Administrative Court to put safeguards with high privacy.

Currently, the law would allow for a “trial” of surveillance systems, which are supposed to expire in June 2025, 10 months after the 2024 Paris Olympics. However, critics fear the law could lead to unwanted surveillance in the long run.

Nevertheless, the French wonder: Assuming that these monitoring devices will be used temporarily, what will happen to the artificial intelligence devices once the Olympic Games are over?

With the absence of answers from the French government, activists expect it to be sold to repressive regimes such as Egypt and other Arab countries.

France had previously sold devices to Egypt to monitor and spy on Egyptians, leading to the arrest and torture of many of them.