Equal Opportunities? (Sarah Elzas, December 2007)

Hello, I'm Sarah Elzis, looking today at the ongoing issue of race discrimination in France.

My name is Marie-Noëlle de Chavigny, and I'm looking for a job since 2003.

Remember this woman? You may have heard her here on RFI about a year ago.

I interviewed her for a report on hiring discrimination.

She's trilingual with a master's degree in international marketing.

She's from Martinique, and she's black.

She started out her job search optimistically.

I was really motivated, with a lot of hope and etc.

I started by sending a CV by emails and etc. with letters and as usual.

A typical French CV includes your name, your address, age, and a photo.

First of all, I sent my CVs without photo.

I had two or three interviews per week.

I put my photo on my CV, and I received perhaps one interview.

In three months.

I collect objections.

You know, it's like a cocktail of objections.

I'm young, 28 years old, so people think that I will get pregnant later.

I am from Martinique, I'm a black person.

As a black woman, de Chavigny is not the only one in this situation.

France has a recognized problem with hiring discrimination on racial grounds, but also based on gender and age.

Over the past couple of weeks, France has been the only one to speak out against discrimination.

She says it's a problem for all of us.

years the government has passed laws, institutions and commissions have been founded, there have been

seminars and forums on hiring discrimination. Has any of this done any good? A year after our

first interview, I decided to give Marie-Noëlle Dechevigny a call to find out where her job search

had led her. After our last interview, I found two jobs for four months for the first one and

two months for the second one. And I'm still looking for a job right now, but I've made a

decision and I decided to try to find a job overseas. I spent two weeks in the United States.

I was very impressed because people don't care about the fact that I am Black. They just want

to know what you can do for them. So when you have to go to an interview, you are not afraid.

You are not thinking about perhaps they will be surprised because I am black or whatever.

I think that I have to try something because in France I did everything I could.

So I have to think about myself because I am 29 and I have to work, you know.

Does she really have no other choice but to leave France?

She could go to court using the ALD, the High Authority to Fight Discrimination, to help prepare the case.

If I had a proof, I would do it, sure.

It's very difficult because the burden of proof is a difficult thing to achieve.

Nathalie Atrupulos is in charge of international operations at the ALD.

The objective of the ALD is to identify discriminatory situation practices, document them and try to find solutions.

So you can call and then we ask you to write a letter.

And then we have a lawyer.

In the ALD that takes the file in charge and tries to gather the information to make the proof.

We can call, for example, if it's an employer, we can call the employer.

We have the right to ask him for any documentation we need to make the proof.

The ALD looks at all forms of discrimination in all areas, not just in employment but in housing and access to services too.

The categories are defined by the European Union and the list is long.

The different grounds of discrimination are age, handicap, gender, sexual orientation.

Religion and race origin.

The first article of the French Constitution says that all citizens are equal before the law.

But as the population of France has become more diverse, it became clear that the existing laws weren't enough to stop discrimination on a legal level.

The European Union passed the Race Directive in 2000, which influenced French law.

The ALD was created in 2004.

And two years later, France passed the Equal Opportunities Law that expanded the ALD's reach,

allowing it to impose administrative sanctions.

on companies and institutions that discriminate.

The first year, 2005, we had 1,400 complaints.

The second year, we had 4,000 complaints.

This year, we are going to go over 6,000 complaints.

So it's a huge number.

We get to be well-known, the ALD, let's say better known.

I think that this is an achievement, the fact that in two and a half years,

we really exist as an institution in France.

But critics of the ALD say the institution isn't really doing anything.

Patrick Lozès, the president of the CRAN, an umbrella organization for black advocacy groups,

says the numbers of complaints the ALD receives are abysmally low.

There's about 60 million people in this country,

and we have about 20% of black and Arabs in this country.

Half of this country have women.

We have gender discrimination.

We have many, many kinds of discrimination.

And it's only 5,000 cases.

So I think it's a joke.

Nathalie Atrupoulos of the ALD says to be patient.

After all, the institution started from scratch, she says.

We started from nothing, I can say.

The discrimination law and issues are very recent in France.

ALD was created three years ago, and everybody has a real hope.

And now people are disappointed.

And unfortunately, ALD is not doing what most discriminated,

people wanted ALD to do.

That means to be the body everybody will have confidence in,

that they will really fight discrimination.

Lozès and other critics say the ALD can't do its job

because it's illegal in France to gather statistics on the basis of race or ethnicity,

which makes it impossible, according to him, to change anything.

When I ask the member of government if discrimination has decreased

or has increased for five last year, they cannot answer

because we don't have any tools.

The ALD itself can't take any position other than the one of the law.

That's Nathalie Atrupoulos of the ALD again.

The idea of keeping race statistics has long been a contentious issue.

It's seen as the antithesis to the French identity to categorize people based on race.

And people worry about quotas, too.

At the moment, we only have qualitative tools.

The ALD can't label people by their race, but they can count names.

They can do testings, sending two identical CVs to a company,

each with a different name on it.

One for...

French, and one more ethnic.

Jean-François Amadieu is a sociologist who's studied hiring discrimination.

He says keeping statistics on names is one way to get around the law.

It's possible to count what's authorized, like national origins.

A person with a name from North Africa, for example,

is three times less likely to get called into a job interview

than someone with the same CV but with a French name.

My name is Patrick Lozes.

How would you imagine that you're talking to a black man?

And there's many people from French West Indies.

They're black, but their name seems like if they were French.

You know, I think it is really hypo... you know, it's not fair.

It's true that people like Patrick Lozes or Marie-Noël de Chevigny

don't show up in the ALD's testing this way.

But researcher Jean-François Amadieu says that's okay

because name-based statistics catch enough to show that discrimination is true.

Discrimination still is a big problem in France.

We end up not counting a certain number of people of color,

but that number is small within the bigger problem.

We're fighting against discrimination on a large scale.

Part of the new immigration law currently moving through Parliament

would have allowed for counting based on race,

but that section was removed during the constitutional review process.

I think it's that the will is not there.

I think they're afraid of what they will discover.

I'm sure that it will be a shock for everybody discovering what is going on in this country

because for a long time, France has pretended that there is no discrimination

and especially no racial discrimination in France.

Lozes says the ALD should be calling for statistics based on race.

They are the advocates against discrimination and need the tool in order to do their jobs.

But Lozes says they're actually working against changing the law.

They have publicly fought against the law.

Which could allow this country to measure discrimination.

In an interview published in May 2006 in the French daily newspaper Le Monde,

the president of the ALD, Louis Schweitzer, said that ethnic counting is risky.

It feeds into the idea of separating people into communities.

He said that keeping these statistics is not necessary to fight against discrimination.

Lozes finds this attitude defeating.

We all know that there could be negative effects,

but the positive effects will exceed largely.

The negative effect, not doing anything,

is more dangerous for this country than to have these tools.

I don't know if France is really able at this moment to receive such a tool.

Nefeli Atrupoulos of the ALD says keeping statistics based on race might work in other countries,

but not necessarily in France.

We can't transpose a model like the one in the UK, etc., directly in France.

But I think that the problem in France, we really have to have a debate on this issue, a real one,

with no taboo.

At the moment, it's a little bit blocked.

Patrick Lozes is pessimistic about France's ability to combat racial discrimination,

at least in the short term.

He says nothing has changed since 2005, when there were widespread riots throughout the country,

fueled in part by anger and frustration of people of color living in segregated suburbs.

Daily humiliation, discrimination, and this social violence is still there.

Of course, there could not be any excuse for urban violence,

I need to admit that social violence can lead to urban violence.

When you see your family, despite the fact that they have gone to the education system,

they're jobless, you know, you can understand things very, very quickly.

So I think we need to have those young people think that they're part of this country

so that they don't destroy it.

I am...

already a foreigner in France.

Because the job markets show me that I am not as French as I thought.

Marie-Noëlle Dechevigny is going to leave French discrimination behind to go to the U.S.,

which will pose its own challenges, and she'll be a foreigner there looking for work.

I know it will be a hard job to find something in the United States.

I prefer doing hard jobs for a couple of months or years, I don't know.

I don't know.

But I need to go overseas.

I need to see something else.

But not everyone can leave.

As French lawmakers debate the merits of race-based statistics

and how to fight hiring discrimination,

advocacy organizations like the CRAN will continue to make sure that the issue stays on the public agenda,

though Patrick Lozes says that it'll stay there on its own.

I'm not that confident that we could continue this way.

Unfortunately, it will end in something violent.

I really, really want to be wrong.

Because I love my country.

Clearly, it's a time bomb.

It has exploded two years ago.

Nothing has changed.

It will explode again.

And I'm afraid that the next explosion could be a very big one,

and I don't want this country to go to this.

If we can avoid it, let's avoid it.

In Paris, this is Sarah Elsis.