Clandestine workers step forward in French protests

NEUILLY-SUR-SEINE, France: The Café La Jatte is in many ways a typical Parisian eatery. It has a menu full of culinary promise, a sumptuous wine list and a handful of illegal African immigrants working in the kitchen.

It also has a rather atypical former customer: President Nicolas Sarkozy, known for his tough stance on illegal immigration, was a regular when he was mayor of this leafy western suburb until 2002.

Café La Jatte has become a symbol for an unusually public campaign by clandestine employees in France demanding work permits. Recent kitchen strikes here and at other restaurants have mushroomed into a broader protest movement touching several sectors and spreading fast outside of Paris.

Since April 25, when France's largest labor union, the CGT, filed a request to legalize 900 restaurant employees, construction workers and cleaners, hundreds more have lined up to join the initiative.

The movement has highlighted an uneasy dilemma facing France and other Western governments: The hard line on immigration that helped leaders like Sarkozy to get elected is increasingly at odds with economic realities.

For the first time, the demands of France's illegal workers are backed by a growing number of their employers. Construction and cleaning companies say they cannot get enough legal workers to fill the available jobs. The employers' federation of the restaurant and hotel business has called for the legalization of 50,000 workers in that field alone. And Konex, a technology cabling firm, has rallied dozens of employers to form a lobby dedicated to the matter.

"This is a problem of political hypocrisy," said Gilles Caussade, one of the two owners of Café La Jatte, as he glanced from his restaurant's sprawling outdoor terrace to the apartment building where Sarkozy used to live.

"The economic needs are real," he said. "Manpower is no longer assured by those who are born in the country, and these are jobs that they do not want to do."

Every time Caussade advertises a job in the paper, only Africans and Sri Lankans respond, he said. The 10 Malians now working in Café La Jatte's kitchen have all been there at least two years - one of them, who started as a dishwasher and is now a cook, since 1994.

Employed on work permits borrowed from friends and relatives, they have been earning standard industry wages and paying taxes like regular employees.

"That's the irony," Caussade said. "They are completely part of the system and yet, officially, they don't exist."

Caussade said he had not known that his employees were illegal and had been caught by surprise when his staff started a five-day strike on April 19.

But their battle has become his, he said, recounting how he personally took their applications for work permits to the police.

"Now I just have to learn their real names," Caussade quipped. "Baba is no longer Baba, he is Abdouramane. Samba becomes Moussa."

Caussade is no exception. At a recent conference organized by the human resources departments of some of France's biggest companies, executives urged the government to make it easier for immigrants to get work permits. Sylvie Brunet, head of human resources at ONET, a company in Marseille that provides cleaning services, said her business could not function without ample immigrant labor.

"Even French high school dropouts don't want the jobs we offer," she said. Stéphane Vallet of Bouygues, the construction company, concurred.

The French Immigration Ministry estimates that there are 200,000 to 400,000 undocumented immigrants in France; reports in the French press suggest that as many as three out of four of them are working.

But as employers lobby for the legalization of their workers, the police continue to round them up for expulsion, often targeting train stations in the early morning and late evening, when cleaners and builders commute.

The issue is a headache for Sarkozy, who has ordered police chiefs across France to fulfill a strict deportation quota of 26,000 this year but who has also promised to help business alleviate labor shortages.

In a high-profile television interview on April 24, Sarkozy defended his policies and accused company bosses employing illegal immigrants of being "hypocrites."

"Don't tell me, whether you are the boss of a small company or not, that you have to find yourself a poor illegal worker when there are, among the immigrants who we do welcome and who do have papers, 22 percent unemployed," Sarkozy said, without elaborating on the statistic.

The fact that employers have increasingly found themselves the target of criticism may be one reason they appear to be more sympathetic to the current campaign.

The movement has been gathering momentum with isolated strikes since July 2007, when Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux issued a decree obligating employers to verify the legality of their workers with the police. Since then, two further sets of guidelines have been issued, opening the door to legalizing some staff in specific regions and sectors.

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