
The Other Side of the Paris Olympics
Paris promised its 2024 Olympics would avoid the labor scandals that dogged Qatar's World Cup, and this RTS investigation checks that promise against the construction sites themselves. Reporters trace how Olympic venues and infrastructure got built, following subcontractor chains down to the workers actually pouring concrete and laying wire. What they find includes undeclared labor, workers paid off the books or not at all, and fraud schemes running through layers of subcontractors who obscure who is responsible for conditions on site. Interviews with laborers, union representatives, and officials lay out how a supposedly clean, closely watched Games still produced the same abuses organizers claimed to have designed out of the process. The film treats the Games' image, built on promises of ethical labor standards and post-Qatar reform, as a claim to be tested rather than accepted, and lets the gap between official messaging and site-level reality carry the story. It is a case study in how oversight breaks down once contracts pass through enough hands.