Benedict Nguyễn , July 24, 2024

Game Plan

How workers and activists are responding to the Paris Olympics Flickr

No one in Paris seems enthused about the upcoming Olympics—at least, no one I spoke to over months of casual conversation with local residents. This despite a public investment in the festival estimated at more than €3 billion, including the €1.4 billion alone the city spent cleaning up the Seine so marathon swimmers might safely race in it. A recent bottled smoothie ad bore the tagline, “We all deserve a medal.” Meanwhile, workers at the French national mint producing the actual Olympic medals went on strike this spring.

When the host bids were awarded for the 2024 and 2028 Games simultaneously, only Paris and Los Angeles remained in contention. Budapest, Hamburg, and Rome had withdrawn their bids after a petition and a public referendum in the first two cities pushed against hosting. Following the audience-restricted games in Tokyo 2021 and Beijing 2022, Paris 2024 will be the first fully in-person games since Pyeongchang 2018. But France, with its rich history of popular protest, not only did not conduct a referendum; it has further constrained avenues for public dissent already circumscribed by its notoriously opaque and capricious bureaucracy.

In April, the Senate passed a bill limiting when public transit workers can strike. Nonetheless, in early May, the garbage collectors’ CGT, one of the largest multi-sector unions in France, representing trade workers across industries, filed notice for a general strike from July 1 to September 8, the entire duration of both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Since heightened global attention on Paris has already pressured management to increase “Olympic bonuses” for other public servants, maybe CGT will get its deal too. But these bonuses seem like half measures intended to distract from more insidious policy changes, like an already infamous set of laws passed in 2023 authorized police usage of algorithmic surveillance technologies on an “experimental basis” through March 2025.

From February to May, I spoke to dozens of workers across sectors to learn how the impending influx of an estimated fifteen million tourists would affect their work, as well as how they’re organizing to protect their interests. (The mayor’s office declined to comment on any of the social movements taking place in the lead-up to the Games.)

In October 2023, workers at Centre Pompidou, which houses France’s National Museum of Modern Art, began what would become a more than three-month strike, demanding job protections during the institution’s planned renovation and closure from 2025 to 2030. When the strike ended, only two of the five participating unions signed the new deal. Philippe Mahé, secretary of the Force Ouvrière (FO), the majority union at Pompidou that did sign the agreement, traced the rifts that led to this ruptured alliance. While FO originally wanted a lengthier construction process to keep Pompidou partially open, other unions wanted a shorter construction process and a three-year closure. Having slowly risen the union ranks over his thirty-four years at Pompidou, amid decreasing union presence in France over the same period, Mahé was heartened to participate in the largest strike in French Cultural Ministry history. But the resulting deal, ensuring greater job security during the five-year closure—almost certainly an underestimation—seemed like a pyrrhic victory.

According to Mahé, the Games were a bargaining chip to get then cultural minister, Rachida Dati, to meet their demands. He described how Dati, who lost the Paris mayoral election in 2020, was only too “thrilled to announce the end of the strike” as her first success upon taking office in January. While it seems workers already have and will continue to leverage the Games to secure small gains after short strikes, ultimately, Mahé doesn’t think there’s too much substantive benefit for workers to extract from the branded spectacle. Pompidou curator Géraldine Gomez agrees. When asked about how the Games will affect the local cultural sector, Gomez was certain: “I am sure we are going to have institutions [that] will take advantage of this by trying to pass social [measures] under the pretext of strikes or closures.”

While the Pompidou strike was not directly related to the Games, in its complex divisions and competing tactics across unions and departments, it can be read as a microcosm of the labor and social movements that are contesting Olympic working conditions specifically. Since the start of 2024, civil servants across transportation, municipal government, education, sanitation, and other sectors have gone on strike. Like Pompidou, these departmentalized actions have focused on achieving parity across short-term Olympic bonuses instead of deeper structural dynamics.

During a strike for mayoral workers in the Twentieth Arrondissement in late February, a civil servant spoke about insufficient support and greater workloads ahead of the Games leading to worsening burnout and injuries. He and his colleagues are barred from taking vacation during the summer in case extra help is needed to supplement the forty-five thousand volunteers recruited as production assistants, ushers, and competition staff. He said that they “will surely be mistreated.” While management proposed a system to allow him and his colleagues to collect extra bonus pay after the Games, the civil servant told me, “It’s always a convoluted system to take advantage of workers while telling them it’s a favor to them when it’s actually not.”

That same month, the Twelfth Arrondissement—whose Bercy Arena will hold basketball, trampoline, and gymnastics competitions—hosted a town hall to address how the Games would affect the neighborhood. An activist flyering outside the event introduced me to Christine Nédélec, president of the environmental group SOS Paris. The group was protesting the potential test run of taxi helicopters ahead of the Olympics and their accompanying noise and carbon dioxide pollution. That night, city representatives corroborated news reports stating that the German startup Volocopter hadn’t obtained the necessary safety permits in time and thus would not test their contraptions during the Games. “Our ally is always time,” Nédélec told me. “When we manage to block a project, even momentarily, the fact of winning some time allows policy changes at the municipal level, shifting alliances with elected officials.” Combined with popular support, movements can gain momentum this way. But in the end, Volocopter managed to find a loophole. While the national government approved a landing pad on the Seine on a “trial basis” through December, the mayor’s office is considering legal action against the decision.

Perhaps these taxi helicopters will allow their wealthy passengers to enjoy a glamorous view of a city scrubbed spotless. While the Seine’s famed booksellers, who were previously expected to be cleared from their stalls, will get to remain on the riverbank after all, in April, hundreds of migrants squatting in a warehouse just south of Paris were evicted. Northeast of Paris, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a predominantly immigrant and working-class suburb, students in university housing have also been evicted to make room for the Athletes Village. The department, one of the poorest in France, was chosen to house the headquarters of the Olympic Organizing Committee in 2021—to celebrate the neighborhood with a “responsible” and “inclusive” Games.

In Paris 2024: A City Facing Olympic Violence, journalist Jade Lindgaard documents how Seine-Saint-Denis continues to face high unemployment, despite the Olympic-level investment poured into it. The jobs the Games havecreated have serious problems of their own. In June 2023, Malian immigrant and Seine-Saint-Denis resident Amara Dioumassy was killed while working on a construction site for the Seine River clean-up. This past April, a hundred community members marched to protest the City of Paris’ attempted cover-up of his death. When Paris’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo reaffirmed her promise to swim in the hypothetically unpolluted Seine, residents coordinated efforts to defecate in the beloved river in late June (#JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin).

Meanwhile, student movements have shown a commitment to reinforcing connections across struggles, from the Games to Gaza and beyond. In Seine-Saint-Denis, students created “unprecedented” coordination with teachers to organize strikes this spring calling for more support to combat chronic teacher shortages. When the Sorbonne followed Sciences Po’s pro-Palestine campus demonstrations at the end of April, students there had already been organizing against the university’s proposed exclusionary reforms targeting the most disadvantaged students. Through the iron gate of the Paris 1 campus, one student told me that they’d also coordinated protests with workers across the city, including undocumented workers who are building the Games while under threat of a punitive immigration law passed in January. What started at Columbia gave them a fresh jolt to justify their demands. The student said, “They’re trying to keep us well-behaved, but we must show them we will not comply.”

Despite all the protest, you might wonder, that investment and anticipated tourist revenue must trickle down somewhere, right? In the course of my reporting, I met a freelance videographer named Damien who began working with two local volleyball teams this year, in between events and hospitality jobs. His Olympic preparations include adapting to serve an unpredictable clientele and cultivating new videography collaborations with athletes and brands. For him, the Games are an opportunity to advance his creative career. But Damien’s also an international studies student, and he acknowledges the geopolitical concerns posed by the Games. It’s hard not to feel like he’s just another disadvantaged worker, without the collective might of big unions. Maybe he’s trying to make the best of a situation that has moved with far too much force to be interrupted.

This logic of defeatism can be seen in Paris’s relatively diminutive anti-Olympic movement, compared to the massive protests that roiled London and Tokyo. Whatever led Mayor Hidalgo to reverse her initial opposition to Paris’s bid in 2015, she’s fully committed now. When asked about her decision to not hold a referendum, she said a yes/no vote would’ve prevented a more “subtle conversation.” Her strategic move allowed the government to make the Games, nine years away at that point, a less urgent, abstract problem relative to anything else happening.

In 2024, still recovering from a weakened, post-pandemic urban economy, France’s collective resistance seemed unready for another shock. And then on June 9, following the victory of the far-right National Rally party in France’s European Parliament election, President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly without even consulting his own prime minister. While the decision prompted the formation of the New Popular Front, an alliance of the country’s four largest left-wing parties that ultimately secured the largest number of seats in a surprise win, last-minute campaigning for the late-June snap election was inevitably another destabilizing development for any anti-Olympic activity. 

Paris’s Olympic celebration of athletic exceptionalism will test more than just its athletes’ upper limits of physical ability. In order for tourists to bask in the glow of this global spectacle, thousands of overworked and underpaid workers, thousands of displaced residents, and the entire skeleton of a city will be pushed to their breaking point.