French labor coercion became legally codified via the 1925 wage contract code

Evidence

A second form of coercion, which also underwent legitimation and regulation in West Africa in the 192o’s, was used to recruit African workers onto European-owned concessions; this practice, like compulsory crop cultivation, had long existed in certain parts of West Africa without any legal foundation. It was particularly prevalent in the Sudan and Ivory Coast, two notoriously underpopulated regions toward which French capital began to gravitate in the postwar years; and in Upper Volta, which administrators counted on to provide migrant labor to the cocoa farms and timber companies of Ivory Coast. The most important indication that Dakar’s attitudes toward this form of coercion were also changing was the adoption of the first labor code in 1925, instituting a uniform system of individual wage contracts whose provisions the administration was to oversee and enforce. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 828