France Says It Built the Olympics Safely. Migrant Workers Don’t Count.

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Europe|France Says It Built the Olympics Safely. Migrant Workers Don’t Count.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/world/europe/olympics-france-migrant-labor.html

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Undocumented workers played a larger and much unsafe relation successful delivering the Games than the Macron medication acknowledges.

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When 2 workers died connected a subway task that Emmanuel Macron’s erstwhile proscription curate called “the lifeline of the Olympics,” their deaths were not included successful the Olympic total.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

Sarah Hurtes

By Sarah Hurtes

Sarah Hurtes spent weeks successful France talking to operation workers, national officials and authorities officials progressive successful gathering the Summer Olympics.

May 8, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised to physique the Summer Olympics safely, escaped of the operation hazards and migrant idiosyncratic abuses that tarnished soccer’s 2022 World Cup successful Qatar.

Months earlier the Games statesman successful Paris, helium declared success.

“We are surviving up to the commitments we made,” Mr. Macron said successful February.

Government information shows less than 200 injuries astatine Olympics sites implicit a four-year operation blitz. And nary deaths.

But inspection records and different documents amusement that Olympics sites person been much unsafe than organizers person fto on, with immoderate projects failing to conscionable basal information standards. When undocumented immigrants are wounded connected the job, workers and officials say, the injuries are often handled disconnected the books, each but guaranteeing that they volition not amusement up successful authorities statistics.

Even fatal accidents of laborers moving legally are sometimes omitted from the Olympic count.

When 2 workers died connected a subway task that Mr. Macron’s erstwhile proscription curate called “the lifeline of the Olympics,” their deaths were not included successful the Olympic total.

When a motortruck fatally crushed a antheral who was helping physique a wastewater basin to let swimming events to beryllium held successful the Seine, his decease was omitted from the Olympic count. “Administratively, it was enactment successful different category,” said Paul Duphil, the enforcement caput of France’s quasi-government operation information watchdog.


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