Telecom Workers Face Rising Tide of Racist Abuse in France

"The client does not want to receive an Arab technician", "Dirty foreigner", "my dog doesn’t like Arabs", "you’re stealing the bread of the French", These are some of the racist expressions hurled at installation and maintenance technicians for the SFR, Orange, Bouygues and Free telecom networks during their interventions. Racist attacks that are becoming recurrent, reports Street Press. In June 2022, a Bouygues technician posted on their professional WhatsApp group: "The client does not want to receive an Arab technician". This sparked comments from his colleagues. "Worse and worse," one of them was outraged. "This client is racist and insulting, be careful," another reacted.

Mostly from Morocco, Algeria, Senegal or Mali, these telecom technicians, regularly victims of racism, have ended up developing a strong solidarity among themselves. "We are all foreigners, with the same hassles due to the same job. We support each other, we advise each other, we warn each other, because we have all experienced this racism at least once," says Jelani (pseudonym), a subcontractor technician at Free. He recounts that his last racist attack dates back to late 2023, in a building located in central Paris. The client would have told him: "You foreign technicians, you’re lazy, I’m fed up with you, go fuck yourselves! They’ve already sent someone like you to me. Stop talking, the door is over there. Get out."

Technicians can also suffer online attacks. This is the case of Marzouk (pseudonym), a team leader subcontracted for Orange in Paris, who claims to have been called a "dirty foreigner" by a customer on the phone, after making remarks about his accent. "You don’t even speak French properly." Another client did not hesitate to give him a 0 out of 10 on the satisfaction form because of his accent, asking for "technicians who speak good French" in the future. While some manage to withstand these racist insults, others cannot digest them and prefer to abandon the intervention, as Farid, a Free technician in Marseille, did after hearing a customer say to her husband: "And here, another Arab."

Similarly, Sofiane, an SFR technician in the Île-de-France region, simply interrupted his intervention because a customer would have refused to shake his hand and then declared: "I won’t shake your hand. You’re stealing the bread of the French." "I reported it to SFR thinking they would blacklist her. A few days later, the intervention fell back on my Malagasy colleague’s schedule," details the technician. The customer would have repeated: "Get out, I want a French person to come and restore my line." Sofiane has a bitter memory of his beginnings in the Yvelines in 2013. "Sorry, but my dog doesn’t like Arabs. Don’t take it personally, I love couscous and I have Arab friends. But every time there’s an Arab, my dog reacts like that," a customer had told him.

Several technicians confess to having been victims of degrading treatment, such as being locked up by the client until the end of the intervention, or having to remove their safety shoes before accessing the client’s home. They denounce a silent racism. The majority of them admit to having been suspected of theft at least once. Constant humiliations that affect their mental health and work. "It’s a constant mental load. It’s not a job I’d be willing to do for the rest of my life," assures one of them. Faced with the fear of losing their job after a client’s complaint and the difficulty of denouncing the racism they suffer, many technicians end up reorienting themselves. Others believe they have no choice but to continue, because they need this job to renew their residence permit.