“I said to myself: this is death, there.
»These words, it was Mohamed who said them before entering the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mine, where he worked for 15 years.
The retiree was among the Moroccans from the North recruited by France to work in the mines: “France needed labor for coal, while no one wanted to work in the mines anymore.
His daughter, writer Samira El Ayachi, tells the story of these workers in her book
The Belly of Men
.
One of the criteria for recruiting this workforce was not to know how to speak or write French, “because it was important not to integrate.
These workers lived in huts with six per unit.
Badly paid, they did not have the status of minors.
But a strike from the Alsace mines to obtain this status and the advantages linked to the profession managed to change things in 1980. Mohamed returns to this part of history of which he was part in the video of our partner Brut .
Society
Precarious
Raw
Video
Mine
Coal
Testimony
Minor
Morocco
Story