"Foreign Workers in the Coal Mines of Northern France during the Interwar Period"

France as a nation-state has a long history of receiving labour migration. The interwar period provides us with two examples of this: mass hiring of foreign labourers during the economic boom of the 1920s and their mass dismissal during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the 1920s, the population from Central and Eastern Europe increased considerably in France. Apart from Germans, the largest ethnic group was the Poles among Eastern nations. The other ethnic groups included the Czechs, Hungarians, and Austrians, among others. Many of these migrants worked for coal mining companies, farms, and factories.
However, during the Great Depression, companies, especially coal mines, massively laid off these labourers. The French labour union criticised this move as one of discrimination against and exploitation of the French migration system, which was centred on coal mining companies. It claimed that although coal mining companies and the French government had promised to pay migrant labourers with the same wages that French nationals received, they were actually paid less and later dismissed because of their nationalities.
This study attempts to verify the income levels of foreign labourers and the types of labourers who worked for a long duration, using historical records. It also tries to clarify to what degree they were integrated into the labour market in the French coal mining industry. We generated data of 650 individuals who worked for a French coal mining company in the 20th century and clarified trends regarding wages, job categories, and nationalities. Moreover, we verified the relation between the migrants’ length of residence and their ethnicity.
As a result, this study clarifies that the French migrant system, which was centred on coal mining companies, cannot fully explain the cause of the exploitation of and discrimination against migrants.