Around a hundred illegal undocumented migrant workers who have been working for the French postal service Chronopost have been striking in the Paris region for ten months, demanding to be given residency.
The group of illegal migrants have been protesting in front of a Chronopost building in the commune of Alfortville, just outside of Paris, since December 7th, with some of the migrants living outside the postal building in a makeshift camp.
Many of the migrants are said to have worked for the company, which primarily delivers parcels, while others worked for the DPD company, both subsidiaries of France’s national postal service La Poste, the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants reports.
Aboubacar Dembele, a spokesperson for the strikers and originally from the African country of Mali, commented on the ongoing strike saying, “We are there 24 hours a day to demand regularization and to denounce the working conditions at Chronopost.”
According to InfoMigrnats, many of the migrants have been hired through recruitment agencies and the migrants have lied and signed contracts under false identities, usually those of relatives who are living in the country legally.
According to Dembele, the working conditions have been particularly bad during the pandemic. ” Sometimes you have to go so fast that you don’t even have time to go to the toilet,” he said and added, “You have to unload the big truckloads of parcels in less than 45 minutes, the conveyor belt must always be full. And there is always a boss behind your back to tell you ‘quick, quick, quick’. During the pandemic, it was worse. And if you didn’t keep up, you were threatened with no more assignments.”
The strike is not the first by illegal migrants working for Chronopost in recent years. In 2020, at least 26 migrants were granted work permits after a strike that had lasted for several months in the same area in Alfortville.
Strikes and occupations in France and elsewhere in Europe by illegal immigrants demanding residency have not been uncommon in recent years. The French pro-migration activist group Utopia 56 has held several large occupations in Paris demanding residency for illegals, including an occupation in Paris’s Place de la République in 2021 that involved around 500 migrants.