from Paris to the Basque Country, bosses plead for the regularization of undocumented workers
FactualFaced with labor shortages in catering or construction, more and more employers are defending better access to residence permits.
With gusto and passion, often a rolled cigarette between his fingers, Etienne Guerraud talks for hours about his business, the “the last great independent brasserie in Paris”. To run Le Café du commerce, in the 15e district, it has been using foreign labor for years. “Without them, I close shop”he said, bluntly.
Foreigners represent 40% of its approximately fifty employees. There is Idriss and Hamadi, two Mauritanians, respectively pastry chef and kitchen assistant, but also Dieuvenor, a Haitian dishwasher and Mamadou, a Malian cook… “I wouldn’t trade them for a Gaul, they’re great guys. »
Regularization procedures, Etienne Guerraud knows them well too. How many times has an employee come to him, after several months of contract, to admit to him that he had presented him with another person’s residence permit when he was hired and that in reality he is undocumented ? This is called working under an alias. Each time, Mr. Guerraud accompanied his employees throughout the tedious and uncertain procedure of regularization through work.
According to the 2012 ministerial circular, known as Valls, which sets the criteria according to which a prefect can exceptionally grant a residence permit to a worker, the latter must present twenty-four payslips, be present in France for at least three years and present a promise of employment. Just over 8,000 people provided it in 2021.
“Allow faster processing of regularizations”
Nothing easy. Dieuvenor, the 30-year-old Haitian diver, who has met all the conditions for regularization since June 2021, only obtained an appointment at the Yvelines prefecture in December 2022 to submit his application for a residence permit. He will certainly have to wait more than one before getting an answer. By then he has ” fear “. “We are at the end of the end, loose Étienne Guerraud. We need to simplify things. »
It is to denounce this ineptitude and the inaccessibility of the prefectures to foreign workers that the CGT was to organize, Wednesday, June 29, a rally in front of the General Directorate of Foreigners in France (DGEF) in Paris. The union wants “to put an end to the “goodwill” of the prefectures” and that regularizations likely to be triggered on the simple presentation of proof of work. “Whole sections of the economy would not function without their labor force”insists the CGT.
This speech, more and more employers endorse it. “The reality is that all restaurateurs in Paris have a worker under an aliasconfides in turn Jean Ganizate, co-founder of the restaurant group Melt. The French no longer want to work in difficult jobs. » Mr. Ganizate knows the CGT well, which has accompanied him on several regularization files for Senegalese, Papuan and Bangladeshi clerks. Even today, he asks the union to help him when one of his deputy heads, a Sri Lankan in France for more than ten years, fears going into hiding when he has no news of his application for renewal of residence permit.
You have 63.86% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.