Adecco and two of its former directors will be tried on Thursday in criminal court for discrimination in hiring and racial registration, after 22 years of legal proceedings.
The Swiss specialist in temporary work will be tried before the 31st criminal chamber of the Paris court for acts committed between 1997 and 2001.
Adecco, as a legal entity, Olivier Poulin, former director of the agency targeted by the complaint, and Mathieu Charbon, former director of the sector, are accused of discrimination and registration “on the basis of origin, nationality or ethnicity,” the investigator said. . The chamber clarified in 2018.
Classification
In March 2001, a judicial investigation was opened in Paris following a complaint from SOS Racisme. The association had been alerted by a former employee responsible for hiring at a Parisian agency Adecco of a classification of candidates with a “PR IV” code to specify people of color.
This code was intended to grant or reject certain assignments, such as waiter or server in restaurants, to these candidates, when the client company requested “a BBR” (“Blue-White-Red”) or “non-PR IV”, depending on the employee .
This agency, Adecco Restauration Montparnasse, specialized in the hotel sector, worked in particular with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eurodisney and the Société des wagons-lits.
Throughout the procedure, Adecco defended itself by ensuring that the “PR IV” code referred to people who “cannot read or do little, nor count, or who have difficulties adapting to the position”, and that “all the people to whom who were assigned this criterion were not black.”
A “current” file
“It is an old case,” Slim Ben Achour, lawyer for the civil parties, admitted to AFP, but “very current.” “This is about the eternal fight for human equality,” he continued.
“We hope that the prosecutor and the judges take into account the seriousness of the attacks on human dignity,” Samuel Thomas, president of the Casa de los Potes and former vice president of SOS Racisme, told AFP. .
The two associations and the former temporary workers obtained correctional remission from Adecco in February 2021, after numerous twists and turns in the procedure.
In 2010, the investigative chamber overturned an initial decision by the investigating judge to abandon the accusation, ordering new hearings and confrontations.
Seven years later, in January 2017, an investigative judge dismissed the case, finding that “the existence and recourse” to a specific classification of “black temporary workers (…)” could not be clearly determined.
Dismissal
A decision again challenged by the investigative chamber a year later.
In November 2020, the prosecution again requested that the charges be dropped, but the court did not follow its arguments and ordered a trial.
“Although considerable progress has been made in France in the last twenty years, the fight against discrimination is a long-term battle,” a spokesperson for the Adecco group reacted to AFP, specifying “to condemn and sanction all behaviors that may be contrary to human rights”. legislation and company values.
Adecco had already been convicted in France of discrimination in recruitment in 2007, together with its subsidiary Ajilon (formerly Districome) and the beauty products manufacturer Garnier, for a recruitment instruction relating only to “BBR” sales facilitators during a campaign in 2000.
Source: BFM TV
