State categories and labour protest: migrant workers and the fight for legal status in France

Abstract

Through a historic wave of strikes, France’s sans-papiers (immigrants without papers) became known as ‘ sans-papier workers’ and renewed their fight for legal status. The state instituted employment-based regularization and unions embraced migrant workers’ access to legal status as a labour issue. Following Bourdieu and Boltanski, this article traces the institutional genesis and political trajectory of the ‘sans-papier worker’ as symbolic category and objective group, highlighting its agonistic coproduction by state policy and union strategy. The study relies on a three-year collective ethnography including participant observation, archive collection and over a hundred interviews with migrant workers, union activists, employers and civil servants. Whereas the new framing initially uncovered the reality of undocumented migrants at work, it gradually became an exclusive category that sorted ‘workers’ from the others. Ultimately, the fight for ‘ sans-papier workers’ confronted labour organizations and the state with the question of when one starts and stops being a worker.

Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction

“…will mediate the perceived admissibility of individuals vis‐a‐vis their ascribed racial/ethnic/national group membership” (Elrick and Winter [] this issue). However, migrants’ policy‐sensitive performance of class is only elastic to a certain extent and remains tied to pre‐existing economic and cultural resources (Barron et al., ; Üstübici ). For example, although class‐inflected criteria for entry or long‐term residence such as language provisions have well‐known signalling, selection, and disciplining effects on applicants, they may also lock many less‐than‐perfect migrants unable to pass these tests into an endless “feedback loop of conditionality” (Goodman and Wright, : 1903), which has become a major mode of control within contemporary migration management.…”

Does Country Context Matter? Sub‐Saharan and North African Immigrants’ Labour Market Outcomes in France and Spain

“…In France, the response to immigrants was very different. Because the French public linked crime to immigration, police were given (and used) power to check identity papers, conduct searches and arrest even citizens (Haddad and Balz, 2006) with assistance from labour inspectors and social security investigators (Barron et al, 2016). Firms responded by requiring work permits (Iskander, 2007), excluding the undocumented from many forms of employment.…”

The Governmentalization of the Trade Union and the Potential of Union-Based Resistance. The Case of Undocumented Migrant Domestic Workers in the Netherlands Making Rights Claims

“…By contrast, we argue that an exclusive Rancierian or Arendtian perspective on rights claiming practices by undocumented migrants is at risk of overlooking the fact that these emerging political agents may also become subjected to governmental practices arising from within civil society (see, e.g. Barron et al, 2016 ). By exploring the unionization of undocumented migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Netherlands, we aim to show how rights claims are shaped and controlled by civil society.…”

“…The study by Barron et al (2016) illustrates how labour unions may operate as both a site of resistance and as a partner in liberal governmentality. It describes how the French labour union CGT supported the strikes by undocumented migrant workers (‘ sans papier workers’) for regularization.…”