Algerians at Work: A (Post-)Colonial History An Investigation into Immigrant Workers in the Automotive Industry during France’s “Trente Glorieuses”

Laure Pitti will present her book Algerians at Work: A Postcolonial History, forthcoming with the Presses Universitaires de Rennes (2025). Abstract: Focusing on immigrant workers from Algeria, this book retraces the still little-documented history of (post-)colonial conditions within industrial settings in France during the “Trente Glorieuses.” Based on an in-depth investigation conducted at the emblematic Renault factory in Billancourt, the study shows how these colonial migrants came to embody the figure of the immigrant worker and the subordinate industrial laborer, a position to which they were largely confined. The book reveals how reliance on colonial labor constituted a necessary condition for low-cost industrial expansion within nationalized enterprises. By examining labor policies alongside the career trajectories of these subordinate workers, the analysis sheds light on the intertwined logics of capitalist exploitation and racial domination, and on their effects on the life courses of this segment of the working class. Using this exemplary case, the book offers an original contribution to a socio-history of state industrial capitalism, viewed through the lens of subaltern actors and the forms of resistance they developed. By examining how these workers politicized their condition—from anti-colonial mobilizations in the 1950s and the Algerian War of Independence to the unskilled workers’ strikes of 1968—the book uncovers a genealogy of subalternity and of anti-discriminatory mobilizations in contemporary French society.