He has been in France for more than ten years. And as long as he works, as a building caretaker in the Paris region, a mason, a carer in Ariège or, since December 2020, as a cleaner and sweeper in Seine-Saint-Denis. But he was never hired under his real name. For good reason: Mohamed Traore is an undocumented migrant. To succeed in finding a registered job, this 38-year-old Malian – a graduate in business law in his country – resorted to a subterfuge common among those without a residence permit: he presented the identity documents of someone another, in a regular situation. We call this “working under alias”. This is the only way to accumulate pay slips and ultimately be able to prove your work and claim regularization with a prefecture.
While a vast strike movement of more than 600 undocumented workers was launched on Tuesday October 17 in Ile-de-France, at the call of the CGT union, the presence of these strikers – the majority temporary workers – in a thirty companies in the construction, logistics, waste, distribution and cleaning sectors, once again highlights the extent of the work of undocumented immigrants and the hypocrisy of the system which ignores them, or pretends to ignore them.
Simultaneously, around twenty undocumented workers or former workers employed by Bouygues subcontractors on the Olympic Games (JO) or Greater Paris construction sites, supported by the CNT-SO union and several undocumented migrant collectives, briefly occupied the Arena site, Porte de la Chapelle, supposed to host events for the 2024 Olympics.
To work, all these workers used “aliases” or false documents, most of the time with the knowledge, they say, of their employer.
“The team leader, he sure knows »
Mohamed Traore is one of the strikers supported by the CGT. Since he has been in France, he has worked under four different identities. And, he doesn’t doubt it for a second, none of his bosses were in the dark. “In 2013, when I was a caretaker in public housing buildings, I first worked with the papers of my cousin who is mixed race and doesn’t look like me at all, he relates. Then, after a few months, my cousin no longer wanted to take any risks so I brought my employer another residence permit, that of a friend. » The boss didn’t move. He just changed the name on the new pay slips. Mohamed was even able to sign a permanent contract. On the other hand, when, after five years of presence in the territory, he asked his boss to support his request for regularization – in particular by attesting to the administration of his presence in the company – the latter did so. dismissed without further notice.
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