Michelin-starred French chef Thierry Marx says undeclared foreign employees in the hotel, restaurant and catering sectors should be recognised for their skills and given resident permits to stay in France. This call comes as the government this week unveiled the outline of its new immigration bill, due to be validated by the parliament in early 2023.
Marx, who was named director of the main employers' union in the hotel and catering industry (Umih) in October says although the Covid pandemic exacerbated recruitment difficulties, the problems themselves are not new.
Restaurants, construction work, agriculture – many sectors in France regularly face a labour shortage and turn to foreign workers, many who do not have legal paperwork.
To deal with this issue, the government is proposing to create a residence permit linked to jobs in sectors with labour shortages, a list of which is still to be finalised.
"Our sector, catering, should already be considered to be under recruitment pressure,” Marx told the Journal du Dimanche weekly last Sunday.
“We have 200,000 unfilled positions and surprisingly, they are not on the list allowing the recruitment of foreign staff. Same thing for the hotel industry," he says.
According to the JDD, out of an estimated 600-700,000 people living illegally in France, around 7,350 of them were able to get exceptional work permits in 2020.
Paperwork nightmare
"When you are looking for pastry chefs or cooks and you cannot find any in France, you have to look elsewhere," he explains, adding that French jobs are not likely to come under threat with the measure, as it would be simply integrating people who are already employed, albeit clandestinely.
Marx says his union has been pushing the issue for months. He denounces in particular the "administrative delays" to getting paperwork for illegal or temporary workers. He says from one day to the next the permits can be suspended or denied without justification.
He says this uncertainty only throws small businesses into jeopardy with a very real knock-on effect on the economy.
"Confusing security issues with issues of integrating people who do not commit offenses and who are a driving force for companies does not seem to me to be the right method,” Marx says highlighting the links made by politicians between illegal immigration and crime.
The fact that many sectors rely on foreign, illegal labour is an open secret, one that President Emmanuel Macron hopes to address with the proposed law, co-written by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and Labour Minister Olivier Dussopt.
“Can we sincerely believe that restaurants, agriculture and lots of other sectors function without immigration? We must be honest with ourselves, the answer is no,” Macron told Le Parisien daily on Sunday.
Macron's MPs are a minority in parliament, meaning the bill will need support from the rightwing opposition Republicans party, which has criticised the proposals as too weak.
France must be able to "say who we want" and "who we do not want" to welcome, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said at the opening of the initial parliamentary debate on Tuesday, stating that "zero immigration is neither desirable nor possible, no more realistic than unregulated immigration is".
Borne said that the legal integration of these migrant workers would "not be on a massive scale" but rather targeted towards those who have been working for some time, often facing precarious and degrading conditions.
Change in attitude
On top of the economic fallout of the Covid pandemic, the trend in staff shortage can also be linked to a shift in a societal attitude to work in general. Besides higher wages, the quality of working life is top on the list for many employees. Access to remote working, four day weeks, more time spent with family are just a few of the demands employers are hearing now.
Not many people want to “sacrifice themselves to their jobs anymore,” Brice Sannac, the head of the Pyrénéé-Orientales branch of Umih told RFI, explaining why unwanted many jobs go to foreign workers.
“The situation is alarming. In the Pyrennées there are 40,000 unemployed people, yet we had 5 to 6,000 jobs in hotel restaurant businesses that were not filled over the summer”.
He says allowing foreign staff to get permits would be a good start to finding a solution, but in the long run, there needs to be a concerted effort to “bring French people back to this sector, one that has a bright future,” he says.
“Our employment offer is evolving. We’re in the process of adapting our working hours and the conditions. It’s not like “going to work in the mines”. In a hotel or restaurant, it’s above all a passion. We need to continue to evolve and change the mentality around this,” he concludes.
Criteria to be defined
An MP for the Republicans party (LR), Philippe Gosselin agrees that staff shortage is a real problem that needs to be addressed, especially in light of the grim economic forecast for the coming year. But he states that the project would need to be clearly defined.
“What does it mean to be in difficulty when it comes to recruitment? Do we have a national, regional standard? What will the criteria be? We will need to be objective,” Gosselin told RFI’s Frédéric Rivière on Wednesday.
“Then what do we do when the tension goes away? We can’t just throw these people away like used tissues,” he went on, adding that his party intends to take a firm line, but without lacking in humanity.
The new draft legislation also proposes to reduce the number of appeals possible for failed asylum seekers from 12 to three and in theory speed up expulsion procedures.
It would also remove safeguards for foreigners who arrived in France as children, making it easier to expel them if they are convicted of crimes -- a measure designed to tackle teenage delinquents.
The debate will continue in the Senate on 13 December.
