Said Argoug struggled for years to get a stable job, but doors kept closing. Not because he lacked skills, he said, but because he lived in a gritty urban area in northern France and had an Arab-sounding name.
“I remember when I first tried to get jobs with temping agencies,” Argoug, 26, said in the offices of his new employer, La Mobilery, a small Web and app developer near Roubaix. “When they knew I came from Roubaix, I got no work.”
The work contract is part of a subsidized program French President Emmanuel Macron’s government is testing to combat job discrimination.
People from suburbs such as Argoug’s are one-third as likely to get work as those from wealthier neighborhoods, the French Ministry of Labor said.
It is France’s boldest attempt yet at affirmative action in a country that has struggled to integrate waves of immigration.
Millions of people of North African background, many of them citizens, live in suburbs of hastily constructed tower blocks around cities across the country. Known as banlieues, they are often isolated from transport connections. Their residents suffer from factory closures, poor educational achievement and decrepit public services.
While affirmative action is commonplace in the US, in France it is known as “positive discrimination” and viewed with suspicion.
Critics, especially from the far right, say perceived special treatment poses a threat to the central values of the country: liberty, equality and fraternity.
During his 2017 election campaign, Macron sparked an angry reaction when he espoused it as a solution for the high unemployment in the banlieues.
Marine le Pen, his rival in the runoff vote, said at the time that it was “contrary to the French Republic.”
Yet it is hard to climb the ladder in France.
It would take six generations for those born in low-income families to approach the mean income, compared with an average of 4.5 years across the 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations, and unemployment, especially among immigrants, is higher in France’s suburbs than in surrounding urban areas, according to the French National Observatory of Urban Policy.
The program is part of Macron’s broader attempt to bring down unemployment by shaking up the labor market. The gap between the haves and have-nots, and the perception that the president does not care has cost him during the “yellow vest” protests roiling Paris and other cities.
Work contracts such as Argoug’s qualify for subsidies, based simply on his home address. La Mobilery is to receive 5,000 euros a year for the first three years he works there.
The government is testing the plan in the area around Lille, which encompasses Roubaix, and some suburbs of Marseille and Paris. If successful, it could be rolled out nationwide at the end of this year.
In Lille, past employment policies were ineffective in aiding the underprivileged, because they offered the same services and support irrespective of need, said Vincent Huet, director of home-help association AMFD, which is also hiring under the new program.
“Fair solutions are needed,” he said.
A 2016 study by labor statistics office Dares showed that employers are more likely to respond to job applications from candidates with French-sounding names, such as Aurelieor Julien, than those with a North African name, such as Djamila and Faycal.
To escape those attitudes, Argoug used to cross the border to Belgium to work short-term jobs.
“So long as you’re motivated, they don’t look at your name,” he said.
He grew up in Roubaix, where he went into vocational training to become an engineering assistant, but he did not find any work in that area and spent several years temping in factories, restaurants and elsewhere before the training program at La Mobilery, in nearby Tourcoing.
It is too early to say whether Macron’s trial will succeed on a larger scale.
Bruno Ducoudre, an economist at French research center OFCE, said that public money could be wasted: Businesses might have recruited people irrespective of the bonuses and France’s banlieues are in need of broader investment in transport and healthcare.
In Lille, authorities are already calling it a success after more than 1,000 contracts were signed in the first nine months.
In September, Fatima Kethiri began working at the Pirates Paradise restaurant, on the outskirts of Tourcoing, on a long-term contract with good benefits.
“It was a permanent contract immediately. That’s rare, really rare around here,” said Kethiri, 50, who spent years in part-time and temporary catering jobs.
The proximity of Pirates Paradise to the economically troubled area benefited owner Jerome Descamps when he needed to find 70 staff members to set up the restaurant in September last year.
Four of the new recruits, including Kethiri, will earn him cash bonuses, enabling him to take on extra workers, he said.
In addition to the subsidies, Descamps said those he has hired and trained are better motivated and prepared to get involved. At the restaurant, replicas of pirate ships and rustic taverns surround a vast dining area where “waiter-actors” dash between tables, calling in orders on Bluetooth headsets.
“It’s not rocket science, we’re not doctors,” Descamps said. “Above all we are looking for people with personality.”
At La Mobilery, Argoug’s employers tell a similar story. To hire a developer usually requires 100 phone calls and young skilled workers tend not to stay long, customer relations director Fabrice Bellotti said.
Instead, La Mobilery asked the employment office to find job seekers who could be trained by the company.
Bellotti said he did not realize a cash bonus was included, but the firm is eager to sign more people from the program.
“People who have a life story create a better link with the company that lasts longer,” Bellotti said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry