Moroccan workers attend appeal session of discrimination suit against French National Railway

More than 800 Moroccan workers along with their families attended on Monday the appeal session in the lawsuit they filed against the country’s national railway company, SNCF.

“We are waiting for our rights to be recognized because the French National Railway Company has raped them”, said Hussein Ablo, 72.

He explained that he had to “work 15 years more” than his French colleagues to be able to retire.

“They took 15 years of my life” said the man, who receives a pension of €1,700.

My French colleagues retired at the age of 55 and I was in my 70s. This is not what they promised us,

he added.

The Paris workers’ tribunal ruled in September 2015 that it was unfair for the SNCF to have taken on 832 “Chibanis” (Moroccan term for elderly people) on far less generous staff contracts than their French colleagues in the 1970s to carry out tough manual jobs, and for them to end up with pensions a third lower than their Gallic equivalents.

The court ordered the company to pay about €150m in damages to the workers.