Sunday, Apr. 13, 2003

Power Comes To The French Slums

By BRUCE CRUMLEY/Paris

Though he's due at the Elysée Palace for a meeting with Jacques Chirac, corporate titan Claude Bébéar takes the time to meet with two new employees at AXA, his global insurance firm. Sabrina Agalia, 27, and Claudio Diavala, 26, are recruits from Bébéar's program to open élite French businesses to people from the banlieues — the blighted housing projects ringing most French cities, where high unemployment and growing lawlessness have produced an environment that French society fears and disdains. Exchanging nervous pleasantries, Bébéar and his recruits are obviously aware of the social and professional gulf that separates them. But in a way, that's the point: Bébéar is doing what he can to bring these segregated worlds together, by prodding the establishment to hire first- and second-generation immigrant job hunters from the banlieues. "Finding a job is hard for everyone today, but even harder if your name has a foreign ring, or you come from the banlieues," says Agalia, a Frenchwoman of Arab extraction recently hired to sell AXA policies. "That social and professional discrimination must be stopped," Bébéar adds, "or France will one day explode."

Late last October, Bébéar teamed up with SOS Racisme, a group that fights intolerance in France. SOS Racisme collects résumés from banlieue residents with a relatively high level of academic achievement, then forwards them to companies recruited by Bébéar. "The sad reality is, a lot of companies processing job requests won't even open envelopes that come with city names or postal codes of the banlieues," says Bébéar. His goal: to find jobs for 1,000 people in the program's first year, at businesses such as Suez, McDonald's and Carrefour. "We're saying: 'Take two candidates with identical education and experience, and you'll be amazed at the drive and enthusiasm of the one from the banlieue,'" he says. "They've already shown considerable drive to obtain those results in a very unfavorable environment."

A graduate of France's élite Ecole Polytechnique and a member of the Legion of Honor, Bébéar spent his 50-year career building AXA into a world leader. But after giving up day-to-day management in May, 2000, he "decided to do something for those members of society not getting much opportunity at all." SOS Racisme has received hundreds of résumés since the project was launched last October. But true success will come when banlieusards and businesses no longer need help finding each other. "Claude Bébéar gave me entry into a professional world I can now travel on my own," says Diavala, a Mauritius native who spent a year looking for work before AXA recruited him. Bébéar stresses that he's not asking companies to give banlieusards preferential treatment — just equal access and consideration. "We don't expect a revolution," he says, "but we are demanding progress."