Informal Work and Protest: Undocumented Immigrant Activism in France, 1996–2000
| Author | Natasha Iskander |
| Published date | 01 June 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00616.x |
| Date | 01 June 2007 |
Informal Work and Protest:
Undocumented Immigrant Activism
in France, 1996–2000
Natasha Iskander
Abstract
Nominally, the wave of protests by undocumented immigrants that swept
through France in the late 1990s successfully challenged the restrictive Pasqua
immigration laws. However, despite appearances, the mass movement was at
base a labour protest: undocumented workers demonstrated against immigra-
tion laws that undermined the way they navigated informal labour markets and,
in particular, truncated their opportunities for skill development. Furthermore,
it is proposed in this article that examining social movements for their labour
content can reveal erosions of working conditions and worker power in informal
sector employment. A case study of the Paris garment district is presented to
demonstrate how the spread of ‘hybrid-informality’ made legal work permits a
prerequisite for working informally and relegated undocumented immigrants to
lower quality jobs outside the cluster.
1. Introduction
What makes a social movement a labour protest? And what can a mobiliza-
tion that casts its demands in terms of identity other than that of ‘worker’
reveal about changes in working conditions? This article considers these
questions by examining a wave of protests by undocumented immigrants that
swept through France in the late 1990s and continued unabated for the next
four years. The immigrants who participated in this mobilization called
themselves the ‘sans papiers’, literally those without papers, and demanded
that they be granted legal residence and work permits. To lend weight to their
demands, groups of undocumented immigrants occupied churches and other
public spaces throughout the Republic, and went on prolonged hunger
strikes in a bid to pressure the government to review their petitions. The
protests jolted the nation to the core, and sparked a debate around the issues
Natasha Iskander is at the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University.
British Journal of Industrial Relations
45:2 June 2007 0007–1080 pp. 309–334
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
of immigration and the changing role of migrants in the French economy so
politically charged it would ultimately precipitate a major reform of French
immigration law.
Although the protests were cast as a call for papers and used the language
of human rights to press their cause, I argue that they were at base a labour
mobilization. The strikes grew out of profound changes to undeclared
employment through which the vast majority of the protesting migrants
secured their livelihood. An anti-immigrant policy package, magnified by a
crackdown on undeclared work, hit a subset of highly flexible industries
especially hard. Together, the two policy initiatives bore down on the use of
undeclared workers, and shut undocumented immigrants out of the informal
labour markets where they had held good jobs and enjoyed opportunities for
advancement. Firms in these industries, dependent on informal labour for
their flexibility, bypassed attempts to bring their employment arrangements
into full compliance with immigration and labour law, and instead adopted
legal stratagems that gave illegal work the appearance of formality. They
developed hybrid forms of informality, where one part of the work arrange-
ment was above board and could thus provide regulatory cover for the
elements of the employment relationship that were informal. As a result, legal
work permits became an absolute prerequisite for access to informal off-
the-books employment. Undocumented immigrants were relegated to poorly
paid, dead end jobs at the margins of industries where they had once worked,
many of them for close to a decade. In response, undocumented workers
addressed the government — and not their employers — because it was the
state that had, through its policies, made itself the gatekeeper of the informal
labour markets where the sans papiers had worked for so long.
In addition to documenting why the sans papiers protests were at base a
labour mobilization, my project with this article is to demonstrate how
examining protests that on their surface do not appear as labour mobiliza-
tions can reveal erosions of worker power and changes in working conditions
that may otherwise be invisible because the employment relationships in
which they are embedded are informal, and thus hidden from regulatory view
— and, all too often, from analytic view as well. As studies on the informal
sector and on immigrant enclaves in particular have shown, production and
employment in the informal sector are highly regulated even though they
escape full state control and often afford workers protection against egre-
gious exploitation (Benton 1990; Portes 1994; Portes and Sassen 1987). Dense
social networks, shared cultural and ethnic identities, and repositories of
trust among community members not only serve as the institutional infra-
structure for economic exchange and collaboration, but they also modulate
working conditions and provide workers with leverage to negotiate with their
employers (Bailey and Waldinger 1991; Light et al. 1999; Sanders and Nee
1996; Waldinger and Lichter 2003). However, the regulatory function played
by these social relationships and norms exists in a dialectic with formal state
rules about firm activity and employment (Razzaz 1994). Consequently, the
organization of production within firms and within enclaves is an intricate
310 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.
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