Undocumented Workers Are Challenging France’s Olympics Juggernaut — and Winning

Paris’s flashy new venues for the 2024 Olympics depend on the rather less glamorous labor of undocumented migrant workers. Their recent strike action showed how much the Games depend on them — and won them the right to regular migration status.

T | he group of young men was greeted with drums, loudspeakers, and dancing as they poured out of the exit of the gleaming Porte de La Chapelle Arena in northern Paris on a Tuesday evening in late October. “On a gagné,” one of them cried — “We won.”

These weren’t athletes celebrating a victory. Rather, they were undocumented immigrants who had just won a major concession from Bouygues, the construction company building the eight-thousand-person-capacity stadium slated to host events for next summer’s 2024 Paris Olympics.

After twelve hours of negotiations, which lasted from early morning until around 8:00 p.m., roughly two hundred strikers, union representatives, and activists inked an agreement with Paris city hall and Bouygues allowing for the regularization of all undocumented workers who had been hired to work on the arena. The deal also includes workers previously let go by the subcontractor in charge of finishing work on the site by the end of the year.

In a communiqué released later that evening, organizers — including the Confédération nationale des travailleurs–Solidarité ouvrière (CNT-SO), a local union, and several migrants’ rights organizations — vowed to continue fighting until they could “ensure the regularization of all.”

“Fear must change camps,” they wrote. “This victory is only the beginning: only the struggle can bring about papers.”

Outside of the construction zone, Diallo Koundenecoun, a Malian immigrant here to support his “camarades,” was taking a break from drumming to chat with his friends. “That building there, it’s undocumented workers who built it,” he told Jacobin, as he pointed to the Porte de La Chapelle Arena. “That’s why we chose this location, to say we played a part in constructing this beautiful work,” which will make France the center of attention on the world stage.

Valérie, a member of the migrants’ rights group Gilets noirs, who preferred not to give her last name, agreed. “We had to hit where it hurts the most,” she said.

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