More French firms diversify, leaving 'colorblind' behind

After 17 years of working for one of France's biggest trucking companies, Mohammed Amar Zedoud was fed up.

"Each time a post fell vacant somebody more junior and with less experience got it," he recalls with a shrug. "It was clear I wasn't going any further."

When he asked his bosses why he wasn't being promoted, he says "they had no reasons." But Mr. Zedoud suspected he knew the reasons: his Algerian name and looks. So he looked elsewhere.

And because France is changing, albeit slowly, he found the job he was looking for.

He found it at the Peugeot Citroën plant in this industrial town 30 miles west of Paris, and not by chance. The French automaker has pioneered a drive to diversify its workforce that other companies are beginning to emulate, even at the risk of violating French laws that prohibit classifying workers by race or ethnicity.

"Three years ago, it was complicated to get a personnel manager to see me," says Alexandra Palt, who works with IMS, a nonprofit group that helps French firms broaden their recruiting policies to hire more minorities. "Today it's the opposite. We are extremely in demand and everybody wants to get involved."

This month's violence in the heavily immigrant suburbs of France's cities, where youth unemployment can run to 40 percent, has sparked a lively debate here about the lack of opportunities that young people of immigrant origin face. It has also prompted admissions from President Jacques Chirac on down that the nation proclaiming "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" has betrayed that promise to its minorities.

Zedoud applied for a team leader's job on the production line here, in charge of about 40 operatives, because "Peugeot has a recognized reputation for integration," he says.

Jean-Luc Vergne, head of the company's personnel department and a member of Peugeot Citroën's board, insists that it is the skills of men and women like Zedoud, not their skin color or background, that gets them jobs at Peugeot.

Like most French, he is opposed to affirmative action, known here as "positive discrimination."

"It would be an economic mistake to hire according to skin color," he says, but then adds that there is no need to do so.

"It is simply a question of giving people a chance," he says. "There are talented people in the immigrant community and we just have to recognize their skills." That, he explains, is the approach behind the agreement on diversity in hiring that the company signed with its trade unions last year.

"We are not philanthropists," Mr. Vergne says. "It's a question of efficiency. We need a variety of profiles to reflect society and our clients, because that is the best way of understanding our customers and meeting their needs."

In his spartan glass-walled office on the factory floor, watching cars roll slowly along the production line, Zedoud has another good business reason for Peugeot to hire more team leaders like him.

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