When the Olympic Games opens in Paris this weekend, there will be pyrotechnics, pageantry, and patriotism. And in the shadows, will be people like Mody Diwara.
Mody has spent the last six years at the coalface as the city of light repaired and updated its infrastructure ahead of Paris 2024. Most recently, he has been labouring on the branch of a Métro line expansion project called the Grand Paris Express that connects Orly airport with Olympiades station on the left bank of the Seine.
It is part of the French capital’s €4.4bn (£3.7bn) overhaul for the Games, and will help to make travel smoother for the expected 11.3 million visitors to the city – 1.5 million of them international – as well as leaving a legacy for residents of the city.
But Mody is an illegal worker, an undocumented migrant. At first, he worried that this would make things difficult even in a city scrambling for construction workers. “I asked around and that’s when I found out that my colleagues were also undocumented,” Diwara says. “They are in most construction sites, whether it be the Grand Paris or even the Olympics.”
This is an inconvenient truth for both an Olympic organising committee that pledged the Games would be built without undocumented workers and for those supporters of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally who disdain migrants – illegal or not – and believe that France would work better without them.
It was thoughts of liberty, equality and fraternity that led Mody to Paris in 2018, an escape from the violence, hunger and displacement rife in his native Mali. But despite the atrocities committed by ethnic militias in his homeland, France rejected Mody’s application for refugee status. He could not go home, so he stayed – living and working without legal status or access to benefits.
The working conditions on the Grand Paris Express project, which he describes as “unacceptable” and “exploitative”, have now prompted him to become a delegate for the Undocumented Persons’ Collective of Montreuil, which protests against the poor treatment and blurry legal loopholes that undocumented migrants must navigate in France. Recently, they have been focused on denouncing the controversies around Paris’s preparation of what it promised would be a “more responsible, more sustainable, more united and more inclusive” Games.
The city boasts of breaking free from the past with a summer of sport that uses much pre-existing infrastructure rather than building from scratch, and leaves a lasting benefit for the poorest people in Paris. It points to those from the crumbling, troubled Francs-Moisins housing estate that lies close to the Stade de France who will be rehomed in the Olympic Village when the circus moves on.
Yet the use of undocumented labour to build many of its projects has provoked widespread criticism and repeated protests.
Undocumented workers have been present at many recent Olympic events. In 2009, ahead of London 2012, 93 were arrested in the span of eight months, and migrants were discovered in a workshop making the Olympic torches. In Rio, ahead of 20216, labourers were found working in conditions considered “analogous to slavery”.
In France, experts say a so-called fresh start instead shows regression into the bad old ways. “The International Olympic Committee and French organisers have argued that Paris 2024 heralds a new era, but so far the Games are in many ways replicating the endemic problems of Olympics past,” says Jules Boykoff, a professor at Pacific University specialising in the politics of the Olympic Games.
The Adidas Arena, which will host wrestling, basketball, rhythmic gymnastics and badminton is the only new competition site built from scratch for this year’s Games. Located on the northern edge of Paris’s 18th arrondissement, it has been occupied three times in the past year by nearly 300 workers demanding legal status from their employers.
That would have given them regular hours, sick pay and retirement benefits, as well as the right to live and work in France. Instead, many started off earning the equivalent of £70 a day – and no benefits – for an 11-hour day in a country where the minimum wage is £79 for eight hours of work and where worker protections and added benefits remain the envy of most of Europe.
The venue was completed in February, and the other construction projects tied to the Olympics are now finished or nearing their end. So the undocumented migrants who helped to build them are being left behind without thanks or recognition.
“We don’t get a lot of media coverage when we talk about the Olympics even though we’re the ones who built the stadiums,” says Didrissa, a worker from Senegal.
It was not supposed to be this way. As a condition of being allowed to provide workers for the Games, France’s powerful trade unions signed a commitment to “French standards” with “no exceptions”. But trade unionist Bernard Thibault admits that he and his fellow organisers “were not entirely surprised” when undocumented workers were found on Olympic construction sites, due to their prevalence in the French construction sector as a whole.
What did surprise Thibault and his team, however, was the fact that while there was “a much tighter monitoring system for other companies, some decided to do the same as elsewhere” and employ undocumented workers.
While experts say undocumented labour is endemic to certain sectors in France, the pressure of strict schedules and hard deadlines for projects’ completion has placed additional strains on those building them. Diwara recounts that, confronted with a fast-approaching construction timeline, such workers were under “a lot of pressure to speed up the work” in spite of the low pay and the already long working hours.
The exact numbers of undocumented workers on Olympic sites are difficult to estimate, as most of them hide their status from their employers or from colleagues. However, those working on the sites agree that while institutions may view them as “invisible”, they are an omnipresent force within the construction industry. “Whether it’s the Grand Paris project or the Olympic Games, there are always undocumented migrants,” says Diwara.
Bouygues Construction, the contractor responsible for the Adidas Arena, states that it “strictly complies with all labour legislation”, partnering with the Paris Prefecture, conducting random site checks, applying internal document control procedures” and signing contracts with “partner companies including specific clauses to help guarantee the regular status of employees on its sites,” according to company spokesperson Candice Broche.
But experts say that in spite of such protocols, migrant workers, including undocumented migrants, are present on construction projects. “When it comes to large construction sites, you can be sure that there are both posted workers and undocumented ones,” says Daniel Veron, a sociologist specialising in labour and migration. “I’d almost go as far to say that there isn’t a public building site where there aren’t undocumented workers.”
One of the methods experts and workers have noticed at play is companies’ use of subcontractors and temp agencies, who they say can take the fall instead of the company if undocumented workers are discovered on the job. “The subcontractor recruits the undocumented worker via a temp agency, and if they’re found, it’s not their responsibility,” says Diwara, adding that “it’s the temp agency that takes care of that, that pays you, that takes your documents,” so that there are as few links as possible between large companies and the undocumented migrants working for them.
Many of the undocumented migrants who worked on Paris’s projects for the Olympic Games say that they have been working in France for several years, including on other construction sites. “We’ve been here for years, I have colleagues who have worked here for years without papers,” says Didrissa.
Experts have drawn parallels between France’s criticism of labour practices in Qatar ahead of the 2022 Fifa World Cup, and the country’s own use of undocumented, low-paid workers.
Nicolas Jounin, a sociologist who carried out immersive research on construction sites in France, says that although there was “something immeasurable about the level of exploitation and disregard for workers’ health and safety” that happened in Qatar, where an estimated 6,500 workers died on construction sites, it shares a “common background” with the situation in Paris.
In both cases, he argues, “workers find themselves on the margins of society,” whether they are under the strictly controlled kafala system in Qatar or precarious undocumented status in Paris, “which makes them a hybrid between entirely free wage earners and slaves”.
In 2022, Paris – and other cities including Marseille and Bordeaux – effectively boycotted the Qatar World Cup, refusing to set up big screens or fan zones over the country’s human rights record and the labour conditions of its workers. That sounds ironic to Diwara. “Critiques of what happened in Qatar are hollow, because isn’t the same thing happening now?” he asks.
After the Adidas Arena protests, some companies involved in the construction relented and offered undocumented workers proper contracts. But not even proof of working hard in the interests of Paris is enough for legal status; appointments at the Paris Prefecture, which issues identity cards and other residency permits, are booked up four months in advance and rules about documentation required seem to change on a whim.
As Paris’s Olympic dreams become a concrete reality, those who worked on building the Games continue to protest against their lack of recognition and the harsh treatment they have faced.
“The government, the media and the population need to acknowledge our work,” says Diwara. “The Olympics, the Grand Paris, were built with our labour. Undocumented workers laid the foundations for all of this.”
Amanda Mayo is a multilingual and multimedia journalist based in Paris. Katarzyna Skiba is a freelance journalist with a background in human rights and European studies.
