For years, Souleymane Haidara, a cook at a chic restaurant in Paris’ richest suburb, has been forking out a quarter of his salary to pay for French health, retirement and other workers’ benefits — benefits he can never enjoy.
Now, he and nine other cooks at Cafe la Jatte — all illegal immigrants from Mali, like himself — are on strike. They’ve taken over the airy building in Neuilly-sur-Seine and are demanding the government immediately grant them full working papers.
The strikes are part of a small but growing movement that has put conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who came to power last year on pledges to crack down on illegal immigration, in a tight spot.
“We’re not going to budge until this problem is fixed,” Haidara said as the other striking workers chatted and snacked in a corner of the sprawling restaurant. “The days of paying for benefits we don’t receive are over.”
Haidara, who came to France illegally from the former French colony of Mali in 1990, got his job at the Cafe la Jatte four years ago by using his brother’s working papers. That means that although he pays into France’s retirement, unemployment and national health systems, he doesn’t get reimbursed for doctor’s visits, accrues no retirement benefits and is ineligible for unemployment compensation.
Plus, Haidara says he lives in constant fear of deportation.
Other employed illegal aliens in the Paris region have also walked off the job in a bid to get papers over the past week.
An organization that works with them, Rights First, has put the number of strikers at about 500. A labor union official said on Tuesday that illegal workers at Disneyland Paris might also stage a work stoppage.
Sarkozy has repeatedly vowed not to hand out a blanket amnesty to illegals, like Spain did in 2005. But the strikes highlight just how much the French economy depends on illegal aliens to do the sorts of menial, labor-intensive jobs most French workers steer clear of. Sectors like agriculture and construction and the restaurant and cleaning businesses are particularly dependent on illegal labor.
With the help of Rights First and the CGT labor union, Haidara and his fellow strikers took over the Cafe la Jatte on Saturday morning. Though the popular restaurant on an island in the Seine River — which seats 300 — remains open, clients have since been few and far between, he said. The strikers make up the majority of the kitchen staff.
With each passing hour, the strike takes a financial toll.
Co-owner Gilles Caussade said he supports the strikers and has advocated awarding them papers.
Caussade said the striker’s contracts are in line with French labor law and insisted he had no way of knowing the working papers they presented were not their own. According to news reports, Caussade and his co-owner didn’t suspect that 10 out of their 12 cooks — one of whom has worked for them for more than a decade — were illegal until Saturday’s strike.
The Immigration Ministry estimates that there are 200,000 to 400,000 illegal aliens in France, many from former colonies in Africa. France has a population of some 63 million.
The head of an organization representing the nation’s hotel sector, the UMIH, said he hoped the government would give working papers to 100,000 illegal workers.
On Monday, Immigration Ministry officials met with union representatives to try to negotiate an end to the strikes.
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