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.
Introduction
Labour migration to Western Europe in the 1960–1970s has raised crucial questions on the political, economic, and social participation of foreign workers and their children in their countries of residence from a long-term perspective. Although from the beginning, migrant workers have been involved in struggles within the labour market (Miller, 1981; Pitti, 2019; Vigna, 2008) and later on in struggles related to the housing market, the regularisation of migrant status and against discrimination more generally (Però & Solomos, 2010; Wihtol de Wenden, 1988), migrant activism has been a neglected topic in migration research. Migrant activism has remained an understudied topic when compared to other fields such as the integration of migrants, national security, or the role of Islam (Pojmann, 2008). This marginalisation results partly from a tendency to see migrants as the ‘objects’ rather than the ‘subjects’ of politics, as well as to see them primarily as economic actors, from the perspective of the receiving state (Goeke, 2014).
Accordingly, much of the existing research has focused on labour struggles in the 1960s and 1970s as well as on struggles organised around cultural and religious recognition (Però & Solomos, 2010), especially after the industrial crises and the shift to a service economy in the early 1970s. More recent forms of migrant activism that have been studied are mobilisations by migrants in irregular situations (De Genova, 2010) or protests against human rights violations and the deportation of refugees in the context of intensified border securitisation (Tyler & Marciniak, 2013). Furthermore, research over the past years has shifted more and more towards a transnational perspective in the political engagement of migrants. These works have analysed the impact of the contexts of reception on migrants’ transnational political engagement (e.g. Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003), as well as the impact of national origin and social networks on transnational political engagement (e.g. Guarnizo, Chaudharyz & Sørensen, 2019). Works adopting a transnational perspective have also analysed the role of diasporas in struggles concerning their country of origin (e.g. Beaugrand & Geisser, 2016). Others have studied the agency of migrants in the formation of diaspora politics of a ‘sending country’, for example concerning remittances (Iskander, 2010).
Another field of investigation has consisted of the postcolonial dimension of migrants’ political engagement, for example the participation of Algerian workers in metropolitan France in the Algerian War of Independence (Harbi, 2004) or the impact of (post)colonial discrimination in France on migrants’ political engagement (Boubeker & Hajjat, 2008; Sajed, 2012). Only few works, however, have examined the link between the transnational engagement of migrants with their (post)colonial experiences. On the methodological level, many of the most recent studies on migrants’ political engagement rely on qualitative approaches (Però & Solomos, 2010; Pojmann, 2008). Some works have drawn on biographical interviews, but only few have focused on migrants’ perspectives at a late stage of their careers, or after their retirement, and only few have applied a long-term biographical perspective on their political engagements. However, our findings show the urgency of this matter and the crucial relevance of retirement.
This article analyses the political agency of Maghrebi-born workers in France by focusing on a struggle led by several hundred workers, mainly from Morocco, against their employer, the public French National Railroad Company (SNCF), one of the country's largest companies. Based on biographical interviews and ethnographic observations with migrant workers aged over 60, this article seeks to reconstruct the structural and biographical conditions for their engagement. By focusing on France, a major former colonial power, this article analyses a context in which access to citizenship, based on ius solis, is easier than in other European countries, but where at the same time important contradictions between the republican ideals of ‘equality, fraternity’ and (post)colonial discriminations can be observed (Boubeker & Hajjat, 2008). Based on the contrasting analysis of three typical cases, this article discusses key biographical factors which influence the political (non)engagement of migrant workers, highlighting transnational and postcolonial dynamics in these processes.
A biographical approach in migration research
Since its introduction into the cannon of social science through Thomas and Znaniecki's work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1920), the biographical approach has aimed to reveal the links between individuals and social structures. Far from focusing only on individual perspectives, it aims to grasp both the ways in which individuals are affected by social structures, as well as how individuals adapt to social structures and in some cases resist or even contribute to transform them. The biographical approach is thus particularly suited to grasp individuals’ agency in interplay with structural constraints (Schütze, 1987).
Concerning migrants’ life course, the biographical approach lends itself to considering transnational experiences, thereby decentring the research perspective from the receiving country (Apitzsch & Siouti, 2014). Over the last years, Ursula Apitzsch, Maria Kontos and Lena Inowlocki (2008) have developed biographical policy evaluation, a methodological approach that, rather than evaluating the effects of policies by departing from standardised questionnaires, considers the life story of those affected by policy to fully understand and evaluate its impact. While policies in different political fields (migration, housing, education, work, family, etc.) are usually developed and implemented separately from one another, the method of biographical policy evaluation permits consideration of how policies are intertwined and how individuals experience their intersectional effects. Biographical policy evaluation furthermore allows for an assessment of policies in the long run, sometimes over a period of 40 or 50 years. As we will show in this article, it also allows for a spatial understanding of social processes, by capturing biographical experiences in different national contexts, a perspective often missing in the analysis of effects of policies and political orders.
The empirical basis of this article is 14 biographical interviews with Moroccan workers at SNCF as well as ethnographic observations that involved informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with over 60 Moroccan workers at SNCF between 2015 and 2020. Throughout this study, three groups stood out within our corpus: first, Moroccan workers who never engaged in the struggle against SNCF; second ‘mobilised’ workers who took part in the struggle without being instigators or organisers; and finally, the ‘mobilisers’, i.e. those who played a central role in organising collective action against SNCF.1 After having depicted the context of migration and the arrival of our interviewees as well as the history of the struggle more closely, we will present three portraits of workers that represent each of these groups; Abdel Boukili, Miloud Jbiha and Cédric Benabboud.2 The interviews show how Moroccan migrant workers were on the one hand subjected to French labour and immigration policies, but also to diaspora politics by the Moroccan regime, which aimed at the surveillance and control of ‘their migrants’ (often referred to as MRE, Marocains résidants à l’étranger; Moroccans living abroad).
Context: Moroccan migrant workers in France and the struggle against SNCF
With 1.5 million people, Moroccans or persons of Moroccan origin currently constitute one of the largest groups of immigrants and descendants of migrants in France (Ennaji, 2014). Between 1912 and 1956, Morocco was divided into two protectorates: the French protectorate, which encompassed the majority of the country, and the Spanish one, which comprised the Rif, i.e. the Mediterranean coast as well as part of Western Sahara. Both protectorates were de facto administrated as colonies (Miller, 2012).3 In Morocco, as well as in other Northern African countries, independence resulted in the signing of a series of bilateral agreements that set the conditions for the recruitment of numerous Moroccan workers in France (and also West Germany) in 1963, as well as in other countries later on (Charef, 2003). However, numerous Moroccans also migrated to France during the two World Wars, either as soldiers or as workers in factories (Charef, 2003). Strong continuities in the state policies implemented during the period of colonialism and migration can be observed. Already during the First World War, the French state used military agents and civil administrators from the colonies to keep a close watch on colonial workers and organise their everyday lives in camps and factories (Stovall, 1993). In the 1960s, in the public mining sector, former colonial soldiers and officers were hired to select Moroccan workers and organise their living conditions in France (Cegarra, 1999).
Against this historical backdrop, the French public national railroad company (SNCF) recruited about 2000 workers in Morocco in the 1970s, mostly young men in their twenties who had been brought up in rural areas and had hardly received any schooling.4 Having passed a series of health tests, the men signed their contracts prior to migration. The workers then travelled to France in small groups and were housed in workers’ homes, where they often lived for several years. It is of note that their contract included a written guarantee of equal treatment with their future French colleagues. Nevertheless, they had a different employment status than French and European workers in that they were hired as auxiliaires contractuels (contractual assistants), whereas the French and European workers were recruited as cadres permanents (permanent managers). Their recruitment status, called PS25, was based on nationality, more precisely their non-French citizenship. It meant that they were assigned to the three lowest levels of the railway employment hierarchy and had to work in the most difficult positions, primarily on the tracks and in the classification yard. Furthermore, this status conferred fewer possibilities of career development, slower salary rises, higher social contributions, lower pensions (on average 40% less), and fewer benefits in terms of health insurance and transport (Chappe & Keyhani, 2018). A similar categorial separation between European and non-European workers had already been applied during the First World War (Ageron, 1985). SNCF's discriminatory policy, as well as similar policies of other French public companies, thus can be read as an echo of postcolonial migration paradigms (Perdoncin, 2019).
First informal and formal protest came up in the 1990s, mainly at the local level, when contractual railroad workers complained to their station manager regarding their status and the ensuing discrimination. Some workers also contacted deputies at the national level (Chappe & Keyhani, 2018).5 The end of that decade marked a turning point, since it correlated with the first retirements amongst these contractual workers – a moment when they realised how much lower their pensions were compared to those of the permanent staff. In 1999, a small number of affected workers founded an association in Île-de-France to denounce the unequal treatment of Moroccan railroad workers. Sud-Rail, a union representing railway workers founded in 1995, supported the association in contesting the PS25 status through a variety of means; a national petition, monthly demonstrations, and the mobilisation of various trade union centres. These efforts led to several improvements for the contractual workers: the right to early retirement, a travel card, and more encompassing medical rights (Chappe & Keyhani, 2018).6
In parallel, in 2003, the association initiated legal action. It first contested the legality of the PS25 status at the Conseil d’État (French Council of State),7 as in France the policies of state-owned companies fall under the jurisdiction of administrative law. The Council of State rejected this judicial appeal, confirming the formal legality of the PS25 status. In 2009, one of the Moroccan workers engaged in the legal action against SNCF met with Abdelkader Bendali, a jurist and economist trained in France and Morocco who offered to support the workers. In collaboration with the French lawyers in charge of the case, Bendali decided to redirect the legal action towards the labour court, with the argument that the lawsuit did not concern the legality of the PS25 status in and of itself, but the legality of the execution of the employment contract, as it had foreseen an equal treatment between Moroccan and French workers (Chappe & Keyhani, 2018).
In the following years, a core group of about 10 activists, all of them railroad workers based in different French cities, started a nation-wide campaign to identify workers affected by the PS25 status, through word of mouth communication. They mobilised 848 of those affected workers to file lawsuits against SNCF. In a third step, they helped the plaintiffs to gather all documents necessary to demonstrate that they had been subject to discrimination on the part of SNCF, such as payslips, etc. In March 2015, SNCF was found guilty at the Paris Labour Court for discrimination against the majority of the 848 plaintiffs. SNCF appealed the verdict. However, on 31 January 2018, after over 18 years of struggle, the sentence was confirmed, marking a significant victory of the Moroccan railroad workers. SNCF was sentenced to pay restitution to the sum of 170 million euros. This trial is unique in that it is the first of its kind to bring together so many plaintiffs in France in the denunciation of discrimination on grounds of nationality and origin (Chappe & Keyhani, 2018).
Three cases: Political abstinence, participation, and initiative as biographical processes
What led some of the workers never to engage at all, others to become key organisers of the struggle, while the majority of the plaintiffs were mainly mobilised by this core group? In the following section, we present three contrasting life stories of workers at SNCF. The first is Abdel Boukili, who never engaged in the case against SNCF. The second is Miloud Jbiha, who took part in several actions and filed a suitcase against SNCF. The third is Cédric Benabboud, one of the leaders and organisers without whom the struggle would have hardly been possible.
Political abstinence: Abdel Boukili
Abdel Boukili was born in a small town in Western Morocco in 1951, as the fifth of nine siblings of a notable family. In the early 1920s, his father was appointed prefect of their settlement area under the French colonial administration. At the time, the French protectorate relied on influential Moroccan citizens to administer the country. While some prefects exercised their functions so as to protect the local population, others took advantage of their position to exercise repressive power and enrich themselves. Abdel's father belonged to the second category, and the local population considered him an accomplice to the occupiers. After independence, and in consequence of their collaboration, Abdel's family lost all their property and fell into poverty. Abdel went to school and obtained his secondary school certificate in 1968. His father encouraged him to move to France and support the family with his salary. In 1969, he left for France with a 6-month contract in the automobile industry.
A cousin of the family at the time engaged in party politics and made a career at the national level in Morocco. He aimed to rehabilitate the Boukili family administratively. Like others in their case, family members had difficulty obtaining certain documents; official records of family status, passports, etc. When Abdel left Morocco, the cousin in question asked him for complete discretion in France. Any political activity by a family member that might run counter to the Moroccan government could hinder his attempt to rehabilitate the family. At the end of his 6-month contract in a city in central France, Abdel heard that SNCF was recruiting workers in a city in Eastern France that we will here call Kleinville. He applied and SNCF employed him in 1970. At first, he was only given successive 6-month contracts and his residence permit had to be renewed twice a year. In 1976, he finally signed a PS25 contract. He worked in the classification yard, a field in which the majority of the workers were immigrants. Abdel recalls:
We were young. The classification work and all that, nobody wanted to do it. I started in (name of a commune close to Kleinville) and then in (name of another commune) and then in (name of a third commune), but in the classification yard, at one point, there were 100 percent immigrants, except for the bosses.
Abdel and his Moroccan colleagues struggled to get promotions. Again and again, their superiors explained to them that they must have French nationality in order to climb the ladder. For the employees, however, acquiring French nationality was synonymous with betrayal of their country of origin:
We were told this thing about French nationality all the time. Well, for us at the time, it was somehow incredible, we didn't understand, we didn't have any information, we wondered what advantages we would have. Some said: “If you become French, 100%, you won't go home anymore”. (…) We would not be well seen [at home].
The working conditions were difficult and there were safety issues. Several of Abdel's colleagues suffered accidents at work. After their accident, their superiors often did not convey sufficient information about their rights. Some co-workers left the company or tried their luck in another European country. However, Abdel and many of his colleagues from the same region in Morocco remained and formed a group with strong bonds. Despite the difficulties, they enjoyed working outside:
The work in the [automobile] factory [where he had worked prior to SNCF] was difficult back then, on the production line and all that, and I had never worked [until then, in Morocco]. I grew up in a small town in Western Morocco, and then I found myself there [in the automobile industry], it's a world apart. When we came to Kleinville, it's a big city, but we were working in nature. (…) We ran through the yards, we were free. Nature! That's why we stayed at SNCF, we worked in the middle of nature, we were not locked inside. But the work was hard.
Abdel took evening classes offered by SNCF and obtained two professional degrees in the field of secondary education. He presented his diplomas to SNCF and asked for promotion several times, but the management denied his requests every time because it required French nationality. In 1986, Abdel married a young woman from his home region. She joined him under the framework of family reunion and the couple had three children born in France. Abdel and his colleagues trained many young French workers, who later obtained the status of permanent staff and often became their superiors soon afterwards. Foreign employees sometimes performed tasks with greater responsibilities than their status would allow, but were not paid accordingly. In the mid-1990s, Abdel and some of his colleagues complained to their superiors and were paid an allowance. During his entire career, Abdel took only one sick leave. He links this to his good constitution, but equally to the fact that he and his colleagues employed under the PS25 status lost part of their salary when they were on sick leave, contrary to the permanent workers.
Abdel never engaged in the struggle for equal rights at SNCF and did not file a case. He never believed that a redress of the injustice could take place. However, the fact that he didn't engage is also strongly linked to his cousin's demand to refrain from any political activity in France. At the end of the interview, Abdel elaborated on the reasons for his migration, which were closely linked to postcolonial dynamics in Morocco:
With independence, all [collaborators] were considered traitors. Then we suffered. We suffered. At school, “He was the son of so-and-so” … All our property was requisitioned, the land, everything, everything, everything. We have nothing left. In the past, my father suffered and he pushed me to leave because of that. Because he was at the bottom [of the hole]. “You have to leave and help us.” I had sisters who were young. My father, he pushed me a little bit, to help the family.
Today, Abdel could retire, but he prefers to stay at SNCF, because he enjoys his work as a platform manager, a position which he has now held for a few years. He is also afraid to end a career that has structured his daily life for almost 50 years. Since his wife left him a few years ago he lives alone with his youngest son. Most of the colleagues he started with have passed away. His eldest daughter has married and lives and works in Paris. His second son has obtained an advanced technician certificate and works at SNCF.
Participation: Miloud Jbiha
Miloud Jbiha was born in the Rif in Northern Morocco in 1952. He completed elementary school and then went to work in a factory. In 1971, at the age of 19, he left for France with an employment contract in a tannery in Kleinville. He was deemed medically fit and left for France. Miloud's brother had already been living in Kleinville for two years, working in another factory. Upon arrival, Miloud moved in with him. Two years later, his brother moved to another neighbourhood and invited Miloud to come with him. Miloud asked his company to help him pay for his tickets to commute from this new neighbourhood, but the company refused, offering instead to allow him to live in the hostel near the factory. In reaction, Miloud resigned and applied to SNCF, which recruited him a month later. The same summer, he married a young woman from his home region who followed him to France.
At SNCF, he first worked as a warehouseman. From the beginning, Miloud identified strongly with SNCF. After five years, his manager told him and his colleagues that the handling service would henceforth be provided by another public company that was nevertheless part of SNCF and advised them to change service. Miloud refused: ‘Niet! I was hired at SNCF, I’m staying at SNCF.’ From this time on, he worked in shunting, a more dangerous field than handling. In 1977, his first son was born, followed by four girls and two boys. Although Miloud enjoyed his job at SNCF, working conditions were difficult. Many of his colleagues had serious workplace accidents, some lost an arm or a hand. Like Abdel, Miloud rarely took sick leave. The differences in rights compared to permanent staff were striking:
You get sick for three days, you lose three days, while the permanent worker stays home sick for 20 days. He is paid, we are not. You can look at the files, we never took sick days. When I didn't feel well, I took two days of vacation and then felt better. (…) We never took sick days, almost never.
Under pressure from his superiors as well as the wider atmosphere for the time, Miloud became a member of CFTC (French Confederation of Christian Workers),8 one of the five major unions in France, and stayed there three years before joining Sud-Rail. Already as a young man, Miloud enjoyed spending time with his older colleagues and learning about their life stories. He also usually organised their retirement parties. In the early 2000s, he was among the first Moroccan workers from Kleinville to engage in the struggle and he remained active until the end. He took part in several demonstrations in Paris and also filed a complaint against SNCF:
We followed; we were in Paris every time something happened. One must go hand in hand. It's normal that we get our rights: they [the permanent workers] have passenger cards and we still had the coupons [8 journeys, he thereby refers to inequalities in benefits in transport]. There was the question of social security, retirement.
In 2014, Miloud retired after 41 years of service with SNCF. As he points out, he could have retired in 2013, but he decided to continue working for another year because he enjoyed his job. Several of his children continued onto higher education and now hold management positions. All of them are married. Miloud and his wife originally planned to return to Morocco after retirement, but since their parents passed away and their children preferred to stay in France, they changed plans and stayed. Today, Miloud divides his time between his religious practice and his family. He likes to be of service to those around him. His avoidance of political engagement is linked to the repression under Hassan II, as he stressed:
I don't do politics, I don't do anything! I’ve never had the head for that. You can ask any Moroccan; he’ll tell you the same! (…) One must not forget that we came at a time when Hassan II was cutting the feet of everyone. So, no politics, period!
Initiating mobilisation: Cédric Benabboud
Cédric Benabboud9 was born in 1951, as the third of seven children in Morocco's Northern Rif-region, which was at the time a Spanish protectorate. Cédric's father, who had never enjoyed any formal education, worked for Spanish employers. Since in the Spanish protectorate schools were scarcer than in the French one (Vermeren, 2010), and because he did not want his children to be illiterate like himself, he decided to leave for the French protectorate. In 1951, the family moved to a small town of about 2500 inhabitants near the Algerian border, where the father started working for a French mining company. The company provided a series of social benefits which marked an important improvement in the family's life; free housing, monthly family allowances, free coal and wood in the winter as well as gifts when a new child was born. The company also supported different institutions in the municipality. For example, a hospital existed in town, which was rare in municipalities of this size. This was a significant experience in Cédric's childhood, in which he realised the importance of company policy in the daily life of families, but equally its importance for social mobility:
Elsewhere in Morocco, there were no family allowances, but here, they gave something. (…) It was in a small town, not in a big city, and people lived with the mine. And I remember, when a baby was born, whether it was a girl or a boy, the family received a specific gift for the baby. It was pink for girls and blue for boys. (…) You know, sometimes, with nostalgia and all … I think it was an extraordinary moment. (…) And so, I started going to school there, because in a way it was the company that created housing, that created schools.
These positive memories of the company nevertheless also contrasted with other experiences. French and Moroccan children went to different schools and were not allowed to play together in public or private spaces, thus creating a segregated environment. Although his father was not particularly engaged politically, he was a member of the company's union. He participated in different strikes. In such situations, strikers were regularly beaten by French officials until they went back to work. When Cédric was 5 years old, he remembers helping his father hide a striker, who was being pursued by officials in their house.
In 1964, the mine where Cédric's father worked was bought by the Moroccan government under the framework of the post-independence Arabisation of the country. Subsequently, it was shut down. In some cases, the French companies that left took some of their employees with them. This was not the case for Cédric's father, since the company he worked for had no mines in France. Its officials nevertheless offered support in applying for passports, which at the time were difficult to obtain. Cédric's father received a passport and left for Belgium. When he was unable to find work in Belgium, he went to the French island of Corsica, where he started working in construction. In 1967, Cédric obtained his middle school certificate. After his father found an adequate apartment in 1966, the entire family gradually followed him over the course of 2 years. Cédric quit school, against the will of his father who wanted his sons to become engineers. He started an apprenticeship that he quit after a few months. Although he was a fast learner, the foreman, a Pied-Noir,10 only let him clean the workshop. Over the following years, he had several jobs at a garage, as a tiler, and in a brick factory. He gave almost all of his salary to his father and thereby contributed to the family income. During the interview, Cédric repeatedly expressed his compassion for his father, who had always worked hard to provide an education for his numerous children: ‘Oh, I felt sorry for him!’
During his years in Corsica, racism had a profound impact on Cédric's life. Racism against all Maghrebi-looking persons – and in particular against Algerians – was very strong, particularly after France's defeat in the Algerian War of Independence. Cédric remembers that he even saw the bodies of lynched Algerians in the woods. Going out at night or making the acquaintance of a French girl could have life-threatening consequences for young men of Maghrebi origin. In 1970, Cédric left Corsica for Kleinville. He chose the city after having met two young Maghrebi visitors from Kleinville. Upon arrival there, he rapidly found work in a metal factory and a room in a residence for migrant workers.
The following years were marked by upward social mobility for Cédric. His income allowed him to buy a motorcycle and pursue his interests, mainly in the field of film. In 1972, he observed that within the course of a few months pressure on the workers increased markedly. They had to work faster and faced punishments if they did not meet the demanded quota; in consequence industrial accidents increased. He regularly spoke up when he witnessed colleagues being treated in a way he considered unfair. He started meeting members of a French union when they visited the company and they encouraged him to join the union. This marked the beginning of his lifelong political activism:
So I talked to them. They told me: “Hey, my friend, you talk well! Why don't you join us?” (…) I went to the elections, but I hadn't had my union's education yet, so I only observed how it went. I started training in economic, legal, social matters, in Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg. I was being paid while I received education! [These workshops] lasted one week, two weeks and that's how it was.
It is noteworthy that Cédric continued his education not through school institutions, but through activism. After having reflected on class and industrial relations in the union, he searched for a space in which he could develop a more global understanding of society, and he joined the French Communist Party in 1974. He became a regional representative of the party and was appointed administrator for the social security of his region. Around this time, Cédric's parents and siblings also left Corsica and moved to a village in the south of France where several of their brothers, sisters, and cousins had settled down a few years before.
In 1979, Cédric quit his job at the metal factory. His salary there was high compared to those in other companies, but the physical working conditions were hard. Upon the suggestion of an SNCF trade unionist, Cédric applied to work at SNCF and successfully passed the written and oral entrance examination tests. Because he was a non-European foreigner, he was hired in the status of PS25, under the same terms as other foreign workers who had been recruited in Morocco. Right away, Cédric was shocked by the inequalities between contractual and permanent staff. Only three months after his recruitment, in cooperation with colleagues from his union, he distributed leaflets in the lockers of contractual railroad workers in different railway stations in Eastern France to organise a meeting on this discrimination. The meeting was a great success with 80 workers attending. Cédric however was disappointed by their lack of engagement, which put an end to this first attempt to collectively resist the PS25 status.
In 1985, Cédric applied for French citizenship and received a positive answer the next year. However, when he applied for a change of his status, SNCF refused on the basis that he was over thirty years old when he became French. In 1994, when this internal regulation changed, Cédric again contacted his employer but received no answer. Over the years, he kept contacting different representatives of SNCF and ‘warned them’ that this problem would one day come back to hit them:
They called me in for an interview with the head of the transport division and the head of the personnel establishment. For an hour and a half, I stood up to both of them. I told them, at the time, in 1996, I told him, his name was Dupont, I said: “Mr. Dupont, one day, this problem will jump out at you, you can be sure of that!”
In 2001, one of his friends, Mustapha Arjah, who was also a railroad worker in Kleinville convinced him to accompany him to Paris to meet the unionists of Sud-Rail who had mobilised against the PS25 status. This marked the beginning of Cédric's engagement in the collective struggle. Over the next few years, he spoke at numerous public events where he talked about the inequalities that Moroccan railroad workers were subjected to at SNCF. After the beginning of the second legal action in 2009, he and Mr. Arjah started convincing colleagues and former colleagues to deposit a legal complaint. Cédric compiled his own file and, with Mr. Arjah, held open sessions for legal advice in a local association, and then later on in coffee shops in Kleinville, to support colleagues in compiling their files. In our interviews, Cédric highlighted the fact that his long-term experience as a trade unionist in waging political and social struggles as well as his knowledge of French judicial and administrative terminology, which he had acquired through attending union seminars, were a central resource during this collective fight. After his retirement in 2010, he had even more time to invest in the struggle, often receiving 30–40 phone calls a day from colleagues who asked for legal advice. Still between 2018 and 2020, in the aftermath of their victory in court, when we conducted several biographical interviews with him, Cédric was strongly involved.
Discussion: Analytical contrast and policy contextualisation
The three contrasting cases presented above allow us to identify key factors that explain migrant workers’ engagement or non-engagement in the struggle against SNCF: family formation and intergenerational relations, transnational links and the fear of political repression, early political socialisation, education, racism, and (post)colonial dynamics.
Family formation and intergenerational links
Abdel, Miloud, and many other retired workers we encountered focused on achieving family reunification in the 1970s–1980s, which meant proving sufficient income and finding accommodation that was large enough to get residency permits for their wives and children. Political engagement or protest against their working conditions could have risked their future income or result in the loss of their job. As this could have put at risk their family project, most of the men refrained from protesting against their working conditions. Once their nuclear family was in France, they focused on keeping up their income and on bringing up their children, thereby continuing to refrain from political engagement. As regards, Cédric's engagement, being unmarried and childless inversely played a crucial role.
However, while parenthood and family orientation might at first have been an obstacle to reclaiming rights, the very same reasons played an important role at a later point in the life courses of our interviewees. Most of their children had grown up in France and had automatically acquired French citizenship, in line with the French principle of ius solis. They did not show the same acquiescence as their fathers, since their political socialisation as French citizens and their knowledge of social rights made them protest more actively against discrimination and injustice. Furthermore, unlike their fathers, many had completed secondary school, sometimes even higher education. We observed several cases in which interviewees were pushed by their children, nephews, or nieces to engage in the struggle against SNCF. Family formation and intergenerational relations thus had a profound impact in setting the time frame for (non)engagement in the struggle against SNCF.
Transnational links and political oppression under Hassan II
Another central factor in the engagement of our interviewees consisted in their transnational links to Morocco and the political oppression under the rule of Hassan II. Most of the men we encountered had the intention of eventually returning to Morocco, some still held this intention at the time of the interview. Ad minima, most had close links to family relatives (their parents, siblings, aunt, uncles, etc.) who had remained in Morocco and visited them regularly.
After Moroccan independence, different political movements that had fought for independence were banished under Mohamed V, who took over the monarchy again in 1956. Many figures of the liberation movement left for France. There, they created the Association des Marocains de France (AME: Association of Moroccans in France).11 This movement gathered workers, students, political activists, and in the first years primarily engaged against the repressive politics of Hassan II who ascended to the throne in 1961 (Berrada-Bousta, 2012). To counter this diasporic opposition, the Amicales des Travailleurs et Commerçants Marocains en France (Friendship Societies of Moroccan Workers and Traders in France) was created in 1973 (Berrada-Bousta, 2012). These Amicales, sponsored by the Moroccan government, functioned as a ‘kind of overseas political police force controlling the activities of Moroccan migrants’ (Miller, 1981, p. 38). The major function of the Amicales was to gather information on emigres who were disloyal towards the Hassan II regime. Each summer, numerous Moroccan workers who returned home for vacation were imprisoned for membership in forbidden (mostly leftist) trade unions and political parties (Berrada-Bousta, 2012; Iskander, 2010).
Authorities of the host country and repressive homeland organisations colluded in this process. The embassy of Morocco for example had relays in different factories within French territory (Vigna, 2008). This cooperation had two main goals. On the Moroccan side, to avoid the formation of political opposition in France. On the French side, to suppress the development of activities that could lead to the involvement of foreign workers in labour and social struggles (Boubeker & Hajjat, 2008). These factors partly explain the political abstinence of immigrants, like many of our interviewees. Most of them were careful not to jeopardise their project of return, and they were afraid that they, or their families, might face repression upon entering Morocco during their home visits. Cédric, on the contrary, never intended to return to Morocco. He never went back to his country of origin after his departure in 1967, even for a short visit. He stressed that, because of his political convictions and his membership in a communist party, he would soon have been dead or imprisoned had he entered Morocco during the reign of Hassan II. Contrary to almost all of our other interviewees, Cédric had not come to France alone, but under the framework of family reunification. Apart from one brother – who later joined them in France – he emigrated with his entire nuclear family in the 1960s. Furthermore, as mentioned above, many of his extended family members – aunts, uncles, cousins – lived in the south of France. Cédric thus did not depend on summer visits in Morocco to catch up with his close relatives.
Early political socialisation and education
Early political socialisation was another factor that played a central role in political (non)engagement against SNCF. Cédric's childhood was deeply marked by two experiences that were central to his later political engagement. First, the family policies of the French mining company his father worked in. These policies had a positive impact on his family and his biographical path. Secondly, his fathers’ engagement in the company's union. It is noteworthy that Cédric's father spent many years in a mine. Mitchell (2013) considers the coal mining industry a materialist school for workers’ solidarity and democratic organisation. The dangerous working conditions in the shafts demanded a high degree of mutual trust among the workers but also offered discrete spaces for organisation. At the same time, mines were easy to shut down and strikes in this sector could critically affect crucial supply lines. In contrast, Miloud's family worked in agriculture and was not particularly politically engaged. Abdel was socialised in a family that was supportive of colonial occupation and later had to acquiesce to be rehabilitated.
Another central factor that explains the differences between our cases is education. While Moroccan migrants in the 1960s–1970s were mostly unqualified (Nuno & Soulah, 2013) and most of our interviewees had at most a certificate of primary education, if they held any qualification at all, Cédric had already obtained a secondary school diploma at the time of his migration. His subsequent lifelong engagement in a French trade union, his eagerness for education, and his training within this institutional setting conferred him with crucial knowledge and savoir-faire for organising protest and mobilisation. At the same time, in Abdel's case, secondary education had not led to political engagement against SNCF. Education alone is thus too limited to explain engagement or nonpolitical engagement.
(Post)colonial positioning and racism
A striking difference between Cédric and Abdel consists in their positioning in (post)colonial dynamics and its long-term effects. Interestingly, Cédric began his biographical narration by mentioning that he originated from the Rif – one of the regions of Morocco that had been most rebellious against colonisation. Right at the start of the interview, he described in detail the armed resistance of Abdelkrim al-Khattabi and his soldiers against Spanish and French troops.12 Abdel, on the contrary, came from a family that had collaborated with French colonial authorities. Because of the post-independence consequences of this collaboration on his family's social and economic situation, Abdel was obliged to abstain from any political activity in France – even though he suffered from SNCF's discriminatory practices – in order not to jeopardise his family's rehabilitation at home.
Beyond specific positioning in (post)colonial dynamics, the experience of racism, which came up frequently in all the interviewees we conducted, played a central role in encouraging individuals to mobilise against SNCF. In general, in France, racism and discrimination particularly target migrants from former colonies (Bancel, Blanchard, Thomas & Pernsteiner, 2017). Cédric's experience in Corsica after the Algerian war played an important role in his understanding of the brutal and sometimes deadly effects of racism. The working conditions and inequalities our interviewees experienced at SNCF exclusively concerned workers from the Maghreb and other colonised states and strongly resonated for them with their experiences of inequalities and segregation during colonialism. This biographical experience formed an important factor in their determination to fight the injustices they experienced at SNCF and sustained their motivation for almost 20 years.
Conclusion
Based on extensive life story research with currently employed and retired Moroccan-born workers at SNCF, this article analysed biographical factors for (non)engagement in a political mobilisation and legal case against institutional discrimination in one of France's most important public companies. Contrasting three typical cases from our sample, the diachronic perspective of the life story approach allowed us to identify key factors for participation or non-participation in the struggle.
These results shed new light on several aspects of political agency in the context of transnational migration. While contemporary research focuses more strongly on refugees’ or new migrants’ resistance against border control, living conditions with irregular statuses or deportation, labour workers who migrated to Europe in the 1960–1970s are often still considered as passive, and mainly economically motivated actors, despite works that have underlined their political engagement since their arrival (Miller, 1981; Però & Solomos, 2010; Pojmann, 2008).
Our study shows the importance of analysing labour migrants’ engagement in a long-term perspective, at an advanced stage of their career. Regarding temporality, the diachronic perspective of the biographical approach allowed us to identify the importance of retirement as a crucial moment after which many engaged more actively and openly in the struggle. It also sheds light on the importance of family formation and intergenerational links in political (non)engagement, as well as the long-term biographical impact of experiences of racism, and of specific policies in the country of origin and the country of settlement in (post)colonial times. Regarding spatiality, the biographical approach allowed us to reconstruct the importance of transnational dynamics in the engagement of workers. Political violence and repression in Morocco, where they still had close ties to family and friends, and where they had long hoped to return after retirement, are central to understanding their long political abstinence in France, where they were subject to surveillance by the Moroccan regime. A further factor that impeded participation in labour struggles was the collaboration with colonial rulers by the interviewees’ family. In other cases, the memory of colonial violence precisely motivated engagement in labour struggles. Political engagement must thus be seen in a transnational and (post)colonial perspective. Furthermore, it must be analysed at the policy level. Here, cooperation, sometimes even collusion between Moroccan and French public authorities can be reconstructed, which kept numerous workers from engaging in labour struggles at a young age.
Our article thus gives insights into a biographical evaluation of policies in a transnational and (post)colonial perspective, but also into migrants’ political agency which, in the presented case, led to a significant victory of workers against one of France's largest public companies, thereby setting an important precedent in the struggle against discrimination on the grounds of origin and nationality.
Notes
Interestingly, Xavier Vigna (2008) 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.
The names of all interviewees and of some cities mentioned in this article were pseudonymised, in order to protect their identity.
The city of Tanger was declared an international zone in 1923.
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, 1996).
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.
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, 2006, p. 100).
The Conseil d’État acts as the ‘Supreme court’ for administrative justice.
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’.
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.
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, 1983).
The AMF did not have a legal associative status from the start, as foreigners were not allowed to create associations in France until 1981.
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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).