The making of 'social citizenship' between colony, metropolis and globalisation: the case of Moroccan workers (1910s-now) – METROCOLMO

This project examines the ways in which 'social citizenship' is produced - in the sense of a principle of solidarity based on labour law and access to social protection. It focuses on the working and employment conditions of colonial and post-colonial workers, in this case Moroccans, over the long term (from the 1910s to the present day).
Using the Moroccan case as a starting point, this project proposes to explore the forms of social integration through work that are constructed in historical, economic and social contexts disrupted by the "colonial situation" and in which the process of socialisation of production through work is not or only marginally related to the wage relationship. In contrast to interpretations that make wage labour the path par excellence to 'social citizenship', as a counterpart to civil and political citizenship, this project thus suggests the existence of other modes of articulation between work, social protection and citizenship.
From a socio-historical and multiscalar perspective (local, national, transnational) and through a multidisciplinary investigation, the aim is to understand what rights and conditions of access to rights exist for i) colonial workers (hired in Morocco under the French Protectorate as well as in metropolitan France as part of the mobilisation of the First and Second World Wars); ii) post-colonial migrant workers (recruited during the Trente Glorieuses in France in several branches); iii) workers in contemporary Morocco since independence until today.
The aim is to produce an analysis of the plural regimes of "social citizenship", to explain their operating mechanisms and also to identify the transformations to which they have been subjected, at the crossroads of colonial and metropolitan spaces, national and globalized spaces, past and present.