The article nicely raises issues that anyone who has followed metropolitan French media is familiar with, the extent of truly crude discrimination worthy of 1960s GB or USA in the employment market, enabled by the precious and very special French attachment to its highly theoretical "equality" and an equally precious refusal to collect data on race and religion - as if pretending ethnicity and religion do not exist make them go away.

There is little new in this, I might add. Anyone reading the social history of French colonialism in North and West Africa (to take an example) is well aware of the pretentious hypocrisy of French universal values versus the ugliness of human nature.

So, a comment on the article, some other data and reflexion on the tension between a very real failure in general integration closely tied to complete hypocrisy in terms of dealing with ethno-racial discrimination, and an equally real problem of radicalism rising among the same minorities. My direct assertion is that some portion of radicalism will arise regardless, but addressing alienation (among minorities, among the chronically unemployed trapped in Continental Europe's rigid labour markets) has immense utility in helping reduce the universe of possible murderous radicals (reducing, not eliminating).

So then as to the article, which in advance I note one should the non-connexion of most of the documented issues with Islam (most of the 'actors' in the article are not Muslim), and the subsantial connexion with France's inability to digest the reality of its own discrimination.

French Discrimination Suit Calls Égalité Into Question
Temp Agency Accused of Rating Workers by Race for Clients
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service

PARIS -- As a 24-year-old intern in a Paris office of Adecco, one of the world's largest hiring agencies for temporaries, Gerald Roffat interviewed dozens of job applicants in 2000. He rated them according to skills -- PR1 for the best candidates -- and by skin color. PR4 was primarily for black job seekers.

I would note similar 'systems' have been covered and discussed on French TV expose shows within the past several years, e.g. TV5, etc. Nothing new here except its persistence. See also, for example: CHANGER DE PRÉNOM POUR TROUVER UN EMPLOI: Discrimination raciale à la française [Changing a first name to find a job: Racial Discrimination French Style

When Roffat questioned this system of segregating applicants, he recalled in an interview, a colleague told him: "It's better to respect the choices of the client. If they don't want a black guy, you have to send what the client wants. It's business."

The clients that refused to accept black employees for their most visible service jobs included some of the city's best-known hotels, restaurants and department stores, as well as local government agencies and the Foreign Ministry, according to Roffat, whose parents immigrated to France from the West Indies. Other clients, among them the Disneyland Resort Paris theme park, imposed limits on the number of black workers they accepted, he said.

None of this is surprising news, one need only have visited France to have gotten this sense.

Adecco, which is based in Zurich, with 1,100 offices in France and more than 5,000 in the United States and other countries, is now the target of a French discrimination complaint alleging that it violated the rights of at least 1,500 applicants by denying them jobs based on the color of their skin.

Tristan d'Avezac, a spokesman for Adecco, declined to comment on specifics of the complaint, citing a continuing investigation. But he said that in 2000 the company imposed a policy aimed at ending racial discrimination in its operations. "Discrimination is a reality in the labor market in France," d'Avezac said. "It is clearly the reason why we have this action plan."

Emphasis added.

Nota bene, the statement is from the corporate spokesman. Blunt, but that is the reality.

The French republic was founded on the ideal of equality of all citizens. But the allegations against Adecco suggest that discrimination is embedded and tolerated at the highest levels of business and government here.

"The official position of France is that we're all equal," said Jean-Pierre Dubois, president of the French Human Rights League. "The problem is that it's not true. French businesses and the French people are not yet used to diversity."

Human rights organizations allege that some laws -- intended to be so racially blind that private companies are prohibited from collecting statistics on numbers of minority employees -- are used routinely to conceal poor hiring records and protect companies that discriminate.

Emphasis added.

It is unquestionably the case. The highly unliberal French system, with its rigid protection of current labour elite at the expense of job creation and new job market entrants (no surprise that this penalises the new market entrants with the worst connexions, i.e. 'new French' of the wrong ethnicity -be it colour driven or religioun driven ethnicity) serves those inside the system well enough.

And the nice emotive language, usually Lefty oriented but as a general matter anti-liberal [we do mean classic liberalism not US leftism] (something that is not necessarily Left).

French leaders' refusal to acknowledge the extent of these practices in government, society and business contributed to the rage that exploded in 300 cities across France in October and November, many people here believe. Youths in poor immigrant communities set fire to more than 10,000 cars and scores of government buildings and private businesses in the country's worst civil unrest in nearly four decades.

Absolutely. Nothing add to this but the degree to which it highlights the idiocy of most American commentary on the issue (as well as the deep hypocrisy of much French commentary).

France's leadership has since begun to publicly address issues of discrimination. But so far, minority populations have seen little sign of political will to address the situation long-term.

"What made me sick was the people at Adecco didn't think they were discriminating," said Roffat, who quit his job in December 2000 and wrote to SOS Racism, one of France's leading anti-discrimination organizations, describing the company's classification system. That two-page letter became the catalyst for the complaint against Adecco.

As I wrote back in November, what characterises France is a polite racism as in Anglo Saxon circles in the 1960s. Certainly not the ugly burn the darkies alive sort of thing of South African or Southern US A, but something rather harder to tackle.

Christophe Makela, 44, a Congolese who was given temporary work through Adecco and has joined the lawsuit, said he was once assigned as a dishwasher by the company even though he had training as a cook. "They said I wasn't a strong enough candidate to be a cook," Makela said. "Now I realize it was a pretext."

In the lawsuit, Roffat and other former employees at the company's Montparnasse office have testified that in 2000 they were using race-based classification systems for applicants. After candidates completed applications, the forms were marked with the notation "BBR" or "NBBR," according to Roffat, SOS Racism, documents and witnesses interviewed by police and labor investigators during the five-year probe.

BBR, shorthand for " bleu , blanc , rou ge ," or "blue, white, red" -- the colors of the French flag -- identified white candidates, said Samuel Thomas, vice president of SOS Racism. NBBR meant "no blue, white, red," and denoted black and other nonwhite candidates, Thomas said.

When the candidates' names were entered into computer databases, the BBR and NBBR were replaced with the categories PR1 for the best candidates (most candidates in this category were white), PR2 for average applicants or PR4, primarily for black candidates, though a few union activists and other people deemed potentially undesirable were included, according to documents and witnesses. Thomas said about 95 percent of those assigned to the PR4 category were black. No PR3 category existed.

"We identified 50 big companies that gave orders to discriminate," Thomas said.

I note that the system rather sounds similar to systems described in French TV exposes over the past 5 years of coding systems.

And the great irony

Thomas said that in 2000 as many as 70 percent of all job candidates in the Montparnasse office were black. Adecco spokesman d'Avezac said he could not provide figures on the racial composition of the workforce: "No one is allowed to have any statistics, based on the fact that everybody is equal."

The assertion of theoretical equality more important than the reality.

A long French tradition.

Interesting commentary from the firm itself:

D'Avezac said Adecco launched its anti-discrimination program after an internal investigation discovered that "we were having problems in the context of questions with clients." D'Avezac said some clients used coded phrases to describe the kinds of temporary hires they desired.

"A client doesn't say, 'I don't want blacks,' " d'Avezac said. "He says, 'I want people who are not from the suburbs. You know what I mean?' " Most of Paris's subsidized housing, where many low-income immigrants and their French-born children reside, is located in suburbs surrounding the city.

According to d'Avezac, the company's current policy requires Adecco employees to avoid complicity or compliance with such discriminatory demands. He said they are now trained to respond, "No, I don't know what you mean."

Well, training and operative reality and all that.

The remainder of the article is in itself interesting, but this gets to the core point: the unquestionable fact of deeply seated discrimination in an job market that is highly unliberal, and a core source of problems of "integration" and by extension radicalism - again one has to keep in mind the French discourse on the issue, where 2nd and 3rd generation 'new French' from the 'wrong' background are referred to as 'immigrants.'