Alain Tsamas is an early riser. 43-year-old usually sets the alarm for 3:45am, leaving just enough time to make his 6.00am shift in the butchery department at grocery chain Monoprix. He’s usually out of his flat in the northeastern suburb of Aubervilliers by four. Since the metros and suburban rail lines aren’t open yet, Tsamas starts his commute on the reduced hours night bus to the Gare de l’Est train station in the north of Paris. That’s where he hops on another night bus that crisscrosses the city, descends the banks of the Seine and shuffles through the quiet streets of the Left Bank, until it arrives in the well-to-do suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, a town just outside the southwestern limits of Paris where he’s been working for more than a decade. ‘At that time, you know, it’s not the sort of people you’re used to seeing during the day,’ Tsamas told me. ‘It’s a lot of people who are living on the edge. A lot of junkies, too.’
Tsamas is in the very first wave, but the people on those buses are part of a daily commuting pattern that’s one of the biggest in Europe, if not the world.1 Nearly two in three of those working in the French capital – just over a million people – reside outside the city limits.2 Most of them cannot afford to live within Paris, but are effectively responsible for keeping the city running: construction workers, transit workers, sanitation workers, janitors, housekeepers, cooks, waiters, cashiers, nurses, secretaries and administrative staff helping to keep businesses afloat.
Their homes are dispersed across a broad zone that surrounds the city, particularly the eastern half of the Île-de-France region. And for most of the week, they’re separated from one another at thousands of individual workplaces. But the early morning commute offers a fleeting moment of congregation. This hidden cohort of essential workers can be spotted waiting on train platforms in the suburbs and flowing out of the major rail hubs, though they’re concealed again shortly thereafter, even in the metro. By the time suburban workers are packed into these trains, designed for and still overwhelmingly favouring Parisians living in Paris, they blend in with residents of the city proper.
samas has worked most of his adult life at Monoprix – 22 years, including 16 of them at this same store in Issy-les-Moulineaux. He’s full-time, 35 hours a week. And yet
