Office notebook. An emblematic trial is due to open on Thursday September 28 before the 31e criminal chamber of the Paris judicial court. The indictment of the Adecco temporary employment group for the offense of discrimination in hiring and registration “because of the origin, nationality or ethnicity” of five hundred temporary workers between 1997 and 2001 symbolizes the difficult struggle against discrimination. “We had to wait twenty-two years for the company to finally be judged on these charges”underlines Samuel Thomas, the president of the Maison des Potes, who took the case to court in 2001 on behalf of SOS-Racisme, of which he was then vice-president.
But where are today the five hundred victims of this “racial” registration system (226-19 of the penal code) based on the codes BBR (blue, white, red) and PR4 (for people of color), which excluded of certain positions for black or suburban candidates?
Will they know that their situation will be dealt with by justice? “Of the five hundred people, 99% changed their telephone number and of the seventy-five postal addresses of the victims we contacted, seventy envelopes came back to us with the words “unknown at the address indicated”. Several have died”, recognizes Samuel Thomas. Of the five hundred people, only around twenty had filed a civil suit before the hearing on September 28.
If this trial is in itself ” a victory “ after more than twenty years of legal battle, the results for the victims are meager: compensation for the damage suffered could only benefit a minority of them, and it is not expected that the ordering clients will be pursued. However, Adecco employees passed on the orders of their client companies.
“Visible progress”
The struggle is not in vain, however. If hiring discrimination remains a reality in 2023, lessons have been learned. “The two employees named in question are no longer in the company and, since 2001, we have had a specific department which trains all new employees. We also do two waves of testing per year to monitor the actual practices of recruiters”explains an Adecco spokesperson.
Since the early 2000s, many organizations have launched policies to protect themselves from discriminatory risks. The French Association of Diversity Managers, created in 2007 in particular to strengthen prevention in the professional environment, and ISM Corum, another association specializing in the same field, have just published in mid-September an assessment of the actions carried out by the companies, from which it appears that ethnoracial discrimination has become a major concern in terms of recruitment.
You have 19.6% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.