Undesirable Workers? Mobility and Social Rights of (Post)Colonial Workers from North Africa (France, 1915-1960s)

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between labor mobility and social rights by studying the case of the so-called "North African workers" (Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians) employed in the French metropolis between the beginning of the First World War and the independence of the French colonies in the Maghreb. By drawing on a huge corpus of administrative archives analyzed for the entire colonial period, it examines the relationship between legal status, territorial mobility, and access to social benefits, and it shows the ways in which the management of the North African workforce challenged the contours of the French national social state. The case of North African workers who migrated to France in this period, in fact, provides evidence about the way a differentiated and discriminatory regime of employment and social protection was set up within the French "Imperial nation-state," by making social citizenship contingent upon criteria relating to colonization, intra-imperial mobilities and European integration. As a result of the distortion between legal categories and administrative practices, this dynamic of exclusion/inclusion made North African workers undesirable from the point of view of their social and political integration, but not their market integration.