“Y a pas de sans-papiers, y a pas d’activité, c’est la loi, il faut la changer!” Workers without papers have been blocking the construction site of the Adidas Arena, the future Olympic site in the La Chapelle neighborhood of the XVIIIth arrondissement of Paris since Tuesday morning. They are demanding regularization, three weeks before the examination of the immigration bill.
These construction workers are working on this emblematic Paris 2024 Olympic Games site as temporary workers for the most part. “Immigrants are stopping the Olympics!” reads a statement published on Tuesday by several collectives of undocumented migrants, the solidarity march, and the CNT-S.O union. They criticize the companies participating in the construction of the Olympics and the Grand Paris project, which they describe as an “exploitation machine.”
“We don’t have the right papers, but we have rights,” they claim, targeting “Vinci, Bouygues, Eiffage, and all those who exploit us on this construction site,” as well as “those who order these projects,” such as “the IOC (International Olympic Committee), the city of Paris, the region, and the French state.” The Paris City Hall is “on site, negotiations must open quickly,” reports a journalist present at the site.
“Today, we need to build the infrastructure of the Olympic Games and the Grand Paris, and it is immigrants, particularly those without papers, who will make them rise from the ground with the sweat of their brows,” denounces the statement. “Immigrants are pointed out as the source of all the evils of France and even Europe, as a problem to be eradicated. Enough is enough.”
The strikers demand “collective regularization starting with all workers on the Olympic Games and Grand Paris construction sites,” “the withdrawal of the Darmanin law, and the renegotiation of the rights and conditions for the regularization of immigrant workers in all sectors.”
Around 500 undocumented temporary workers have initiated a strike movement in Paris and other parts of Île-de-France, notably in Seine-Saint-Denis, in about thirty companies in the construction, logistics, distribution, cleaning, as well as in the interim agencies that recruit them.
