“SNCF found guilty of discriminating against Moroccan workers”, 21 Sep 2015

The French rail operator SNCF has been ordered to pay about €150m (£97m) in damages after being found guilty of discriminating against hundreds of Moroccan workers.  The employees had sued the transport company, claiming they had been deliberately passed over for promotion and offered fewer work and retirement benefits than their French and European colleagues…[T]he tribunal upheld legal complaints that the Moroccans were not given the status of “railway worker” that would have entitled them to special benefits covering job security, early retirement and working hours. At the time the north Africans were taken on, only young French recruits, and later those from the European Union, were entitled to the special status…The judges awarded damages and compensation of between €150,000 and €230,000 to individual workers, many of whom had waited more than a decade for the case to be settled…SNCF, which had argued in court that it was legal to distinguish between staff hired on permanent contracts and those taken on as contract workers, has a month to appeal against the legal ruling and the payouts...