2023-04-16 11:38:39
While a recruitment campaign is underway to find the 45,000 volunteers needed for the smooth running of the Paris Olympic Games, from July 26 to August 11, 2024, a reverse slogan has been launched: register as a volunteer to the Olympics… and not showing up.
The idea is simple, and legal: while the Olympic Committee has launched a campaign to hire 45,000 volunteers for the Paris 2024 Games, groups opposed to the holding of the competition want to disrupt the organization with false candidacies from volunteers.
Register as a volunteer for the 2024 Olympics, why and how, a thread
— Tankietfield (@Tankietfield) March 22, 2023
Open until May 3, the campaign is denounced by activists, who emphasize the excessive availability demanded of these thousands of unhoused and barely paid volunteers. They will indeed have to be “mobilizable at least 10 days” during the summer of 2024, during which they can be employed up to 10 hours a day and 48 hours a week, according to the charter published by the Olympic Committee.
Alice*, 33, is one of these “false volunteers”, the number of which is difficult to assess. Coming from the “sports community”, and organizer of several sporting events, she is counting on the solidity of her candidacy to be recruited. If she succeeds, she hesitates between “withdrawing at the last moment”, going on a “work-to-rule strike” or taking advantage of the presence of cameras from all over the world to attempt media action. Because if it is clearly specified that the volunteers will have “no permanent legal subordination”, essential in France to establish an employment contract, the extent of the tasks which will be assigned to them makes her tick.
“I find it shameful that with a budget of 8.8 billion euros, the Olympic Games resort to volunteers by asking them for such an involvement, she confides to explain her action. This is approaching hidden work. , and I want to help disrupt these Games, which pose problems at all levels, whether in social, economic, security or environmental terms.”
“The Games are rampage accelerators”
His revolt is shared by the Saccage 2024 collective, created in November 2020 and bringing together the inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis to denounce the damage caused by competition in the territory.
“For us, says Clément*, a member of the collective which regularly organizes public meetings and demonstrations, the Games are accelerators of rampage. Under the guise of collective jubilation, they allow security laws to be passed, like the one adopted on Wednesday, destroy green spaces and accelerate gentrification processes that will not benefit the inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis”. And this while this department, which must accommodate a large part of the facilities and events of the Games, is the poorest in metropolitan France.
>> To read also: Paris-2024: the Olympics, Trojan horse of algorithmic video surveillance?
The activist also protests against the working conditions of the workers employed on these pharaonic construction sites, some of whom are undocumented. The call for false volunteers is thus, according to him, less a form of sabotage than a means of making a dissenting voice heard, while the authorities, such as the Olympic Committee, highlight the benefits to be derived from the holding of the Olympic Games in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis.
“We want to denounce the fact that the Olympics are a private brand, a lucrative organization with sponsors, which employs heaps of public money and volunteers, he says. It’s scandalous, and it takes place under the covered with Olympic values, but in reality hypocritical, individualistic and competitive. We are boasted of a ‘great human adventure’, when nothing is going well.”
Contested sites
The various Olympic projects underway in Seine-Saint-Denis are thus, for some, the subject of local resistance. Federated since 2017 in a “vigilance committee”, residents of the city of Saint-Denis, which will host the athletes’ village and several sporting events, have for example organized “toxic tours” leading to the various Olympic sites, to denounce their ecological impact.
Cécile Gintrac, one of their spokespersons, particularly points to the repercussions that the Games will have on her city, where two districts are currently emerging from the ground to host the sports competition.
“The Games will transform Saint-Denis, and worsen an already degraded situation in environmental terms, denounces this geography professor. The neighborhoods under construction, which must survive the Olympics to accommodate new inhabitants, lack green spaces and are stuck between major roads. It is nice to highlight the use of ecological materials, despite all the money invested, the legacy of the Olympic Games risks being harmful to the population.”
Administrative inquiries
Arthur, a member of Saccage 2024, does not think otherwise: for him, in addition to having “anti-ecological” consequences, the argument in favor of the Olympic Games relating to the creation of jobs and the revitalization of the territories does not hold.
“The jobs created on the occasion of the Olympics are precarious and short-lived, he underlines, and the massive use of volunteers adds a layer. We suspect that there will not be 45,000 fake volunteers for the Olympics, but this campaign helps to encourage people to take action at their own level, while sending a message to the organizers.”
Contacted, the organizing committee of the Olympic Games seems, for its part, to have become aware of the threat represented by false candidacies. Thus, say the organizers, if the “mobilization processes must make it possible to ensure the sincerity of the candidates’ commitment” and their “support for the project and the values of Paris-2024”, the accredited volunteers will subject to a “prior administrative inquiry” to avoid any risk of sabotage. They also plan to recruit a team of replacement volunteers, to be mobilized in the event of too many withdrawals.
*Names have been changed.
#Paris #activists #campaign #disrupt #organization #Olympics