Former top executives of France Télécom on trial for harassing employees

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/world/europe/france-telecom-trial.html

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

83 71 7 years ago

Invictus0• 7 years ago

This is a very sad case, but it's easy to see why the French labor market is in a shambles. Which is worse, firing 20k employees or losing all 130k jobs if the company goes underwater? Firing employees needs to be done: how can you build a business without this ability?

Edit: I'm not justifying the harassment: I am speaking only about the larger labor market.

Semaphor• 7 years ago

But it's not about firing.

But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.
So the executives resolved to make life so unbearable that the workers would leave, prosecutors say.

Should they have been able to fire them? I don't know. But this is something different.

rurounijones2• 7 years ago

If the major company needed to fire 20k people and was legally unable to do so due to grandfathered in formerly-government-employees then they should have raised this, brought it up with the government, made it a national conversation, be the squeaky wheel.

Not harass and screw with the employees to the point of suicide.

Sometimes a work-around to the problem is not better than an actual solution, no matter how painful the solution may be.

The "Via the window or the door" comment just shows how much they didn't give a damn about their employees as actual human beings.

will42744• 7 years ago

If the major company needed to fire 20k people and was legally unable to do so due to grandfathered in formerly-government-employees then they should have raised this, brought it up with the government, made it a national conversation, be the squeaky wheel.

Because the press and people in France are know to be very sympathetic to tear-jerk stories from major Telecom companies?

The disregard for human beings isn't ok, but the alternative here is the company going bankrupt, firing all 130k employees, and prompting the sale of French Telecom infrastructure to foreign corporations at a discount via liquidation. I'm for that compared to harassment to suicide, but let's not pretend there's a happy alternative where everybody gets together and saves the company.

Gibbon13• 7 years ago

Probably my bias working at small shops where hiring difficult and firing people is often ugly. Got to ask. Why try to fire 20,000 workers instead of find something profitable for them to do?

angry_octet• 7 years ago

The normal thing to do is split the company into multiple divisions, then separate those with little future and let them go bust. But leading a smaller company would have diminished the stature of the FT management, and they thought they could get away with it in the era of Sarkozy.

el_dev_hell• 7 years ago

It's a utilitarian dilemma (almost too perfectly).

Fire X (X = less than all) employees or do nothing and all employees will lose their job. Assuming some portion of employees will commit suicide from the job loss, this is the best outcome.

adev_2• 7 years ago

Assuming some portion of employees will commit suicide from the job loss

It is not.

The problem here is that no firing has been done. They harassed they own employees close to suicide to make them leave instead of paying them to leave.... That's the problem and that's why they are in court.

PunchTornado2• 7 years ago

fake dilemma. you can fire state employees in France but it is much harder and you have to have good reasons.

most large businesses don't have good reasons to fire a huge chunk of their workforce, except for delivering more money to rich shareholders.

adev_2• 7 years ago

Yes. You can fire a state employee in France but the departure bonus is big and it cost money.

Consequently it is much better for shareholders to push them to leave by making their life miserable, and it's exactly what they did....

quibbler• 7 years ago

Apparently their jobs had become obsolete. Why exactly should their employment continue? Framing it as "delivering more money to shareholders" is so misguided.

Their salaries would be paid by the public anyway, factored into the price of the company's product.

Isn't it also humiliating to be paid for useless work? I think it can be better for the "victim" to be fired, too, so that they can find a more useful occupation.

How do people actually feel avout paying people for doing useless work? I personally find it quite enraging at times.

Where in the article is the "taking it up with the government" part? Shouldn't government take part of the blame?

malandrew3• 7 years ago

Delivering money to shareholders is a good reason. That’s the entire reason these enterprises exist. Everyone hired knows that’s the deal when you applied to work at a company. If you dont agree with that, don’t take the job.

paxys• 7 years ago

Harassment is never justified, no matter the reason.

etripe• 7 years ago

Firing employees needs to be done: how can you build a business without this ability?

Laying off people to balance the books is a novel concept, introduced in the 80s. What leads you to think you can't build a business without it?

hkai• 7 years ago

But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

It would be interesting to see research that shows whether being an "employee for life" in an office environment (as opposed to judges) leads to more productivity or other benefits.

35 out 22,000 employees committing suicide is a very high number. If that started in 2007 and happened let's say over 5 years, that would be double of the average Paris suicide rate among adults, or the same as in the worst regions of France (Normandie and the north of France in general).

PunchTornado2• 7 years ago

that kind of research is impossible to do imo.

also i don't think productivity should be the main focus

dalbasal• 7 years ago

Measuring office worker productivity/output is very difficult. If it was possible to measure company culture would be very different.

praptak3• 7 years ago

22k is a small sample for such a rare event. The relatively high rate might just be an artifact of statistics.

twien• 7 years ago

Reminds me of this part from Taleb:

"Assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw? 2

Dr. John refers to the question as trivial and gives the mathematically correct answer of one half. Fat Tony calls Dr. John a sucker and says, “no more than 1 percent, of course … the coin gotta be loaded.”"

The point being, what are the odds of getting an artifact of statistics precisely when management is harrassing employees to get rid of them from payroll?

karlp• 7 years ago

Someone committed suicide by hanging themself with an ethernet cable, it wasn't an "artifact"

GuiA• 7 years ago

Except you're measuring a population of France Télécom employees, not the average population of Normandie. Suicide may be high in Normandie because of unemployment, something that employees of France Télécom are not affacted by. Other things like educational achievement matter: e.g. in the US, "men and women aged ≥25 years with at least a college degree exhibited the lowest suicide rates" [0]. I don't have references for France but there are likely to be similar skews.

In this case there is a real question of if this is a clear phenomenon of workplace conditions induced suicide, as harassment, lack of proper training, and other poor conditions were widely reported, so while statistics are a useful tool they don't give all the pieces of the puzzle.

As a French person with family members who've worked at France Télécom, I can vouch that there are factors at play here involving perception of status and employment in French culture that may be novel to e.g. Americans. Japanese culture exhibits similar phenomena. The article summarizes it well:

“These companies were considered family,” Mr. Ledoux told the court. To be mistreated by one is extremely transgressive,” he said.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28756896

Gibbon13• 7 years ago

“These companies were considered family,” Mr. Ledoux told the court. To be mistreated by one is extremely transgressive,” he said.

Reminds me of the very high suicide rate among divorced men. Also friend of mine who's new boss was working to get rid of him. He shot himself rather than accept being fired.

pjc50• 7 years ago

How does this compare to the notorious Foxconn?

RivieraKid4• 7 years ago

But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

Excessive worker protection is what's wrong with France's economy.

lostlogin• 7 years ago

Perhaps, yet when you are there you are there the lifestyle seems rather attractive. You win some and lose some.

Cynddl2• 7 years ago

I'm confused. Can you justify your claim? What is wrong with the French economy and how is it related to worker protection? France is, e.g., behind Germany in term of employer protection according to the OECD [1].

[1] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_R

chewz• 7 years ago

Excessive worker protection is what's wrong with France's economy.

Excessive billionaires protection is what is wrong with the US economy.

leaveyou• 7 years ago

you should see the management protection..

oracle2025• 7 years ago

16K $ is quite a mild punishment for a top executive, but I guess the families of those dead, und other harrassment victims will sue for damages after the criminal trial.

will42744• 7 years ago

France has a suicide rate of 12.1 per 100k (WHO 2016). With 130,000 employees, we'd expect 15.73 suicides per year without harassment. The number of years is unclear - the article mentions privatization in 2003, massive debt by 2005, and suicides in 2007 and 2009. Presumably (because the article does not mention it) the policies are no longer in place. 35 suicides are part of the case and the article mentions "workers’ advocates say nearly double that number" but doesn't go into details about the criteria.

Cab anybody link another source with more information? I'm continually disappointed by the NYTs inattention to hard numbers.

willvarfar• 7 years ago

Are suicide rates different for different groups of people, e.g. employed adults vs unemployed adults?

will42744• 7 years ago

Certainly. And for men vs women, old vs young, and others.

flukus• 7 years ago

I think you'd need a better baseline than the general population too, workers in the same/similar industry, similar pay and probably most importantly similar job stability. The suicide rate before the privatization would probably be best.

I would assume these employees are more skilled than average, perhaps better paid than average and previously had great job security. From there I'd assume that their suicide rate was and should be well below the national average.

EdwardDiego3• 7 years ago

I'm disappointed by your inattention to proper selection of relevant samples.

will42744• 7 years ago

? Care to explain?

cm21872• 7 years ago

The only form of harassment mentioned in the article is allocating employees to positions they don't like. And from the description of the positions, none seems particularly terrible. It's not like if they were asked to clean up a septic tank. And as others mentioned here, it doesn't seem to be a particularly high suicide rate for France either.

maeln• 7 years ago

This article doesn't go much in detail. A lot of French article describe better what happen. France Telecom became a case study in a lot of management classes of what not to do.

They even not really secretive about it, upper management even made classes for the middle management to teach them how to make someone quit. Giving bullshit/meaningless task, putting people in position were they had nothing to do but sit on a chair all day, enforcing dumb rules very strictly and having in general a very aggressive communication.

A lot of people don't realize how hard these things can be. Having nothing to do or only meaningless tasks makes you depressed really quickly. Having suffered it for 2 years, I think most people don't understand how difficult it can be.

sgift2• 7 years ago

A lot of people don't realize how hard these things can be. Having nothing to do or only meaningless tasks makes you depressed really quickly. Having suffered it for 2 years, I think most people don't understand how difficult it can be.

Yeah. Most people think "what's so bad about free time at work" - Sure, a few days of nothing to do sounds great .. but then the days become weeks, then month and every time you ask "Nope. Nothing to do." and at some point the realization sinks in that this is what you will do a good part of your waking day until the end of your life if you do not get out there. But you have liabilities. People depend on you. You cannot just quit, right? You have to suck it up? And so on. It's easy to say "quit being dramatic" if you haven't been affected by it.

raverbashing2• 7 years ago

Goes to show that sometimes a "privilege" can become a burden.

That being said, quitting is better than more extreme actions. But I guess they were too attached to the idea of "employee for life" (not blaming them) that they couldn't see a different way out of it.

kabwj• 7 years ago

I don’t understand why the child comment is dead. Being forced to stay in a shitty job because there are no other jobs is definitely a thing, especially in Europe.

raverbashing2• 7 years ago

While the job market can be complicated sometimes, "no other jobs" is a stretch, especially for qualified workers.

Service provider companies (common in France) might be tempted to hire people who know FT's internals for management and contact building.

boohoojangles2• 7 years ago

Not just in Europe, but in the USA there are situations like that.

Not everyone works for IT that there are a lot of plenty opportunities.

fmajid• 7 years ago

I worked for FT 1996-2000, so before these events. One point worth keeping in mind is they had a surge of hiring in the 70s when the French government invested massively in digitizing the phone network after decades of neglect. Trying to retrain them into the new jobs required for the Internet era was always going to be a struggle.

Isinlor3• 7 years ago

"But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected."

I hear the first time about a practice like this on that scale... (besides communism, but that's not France)

I know that academic tenure works like that, some union management people have this type of protection, data protection officers, maybe some other special professions that have a conflict of interest with their employer;

But who in their right mind would hire 20 000 employees (or 130 000?) without a way to fire them?

What if a company simply does not have work for them? Should the company invent work for them that is economically not rational?

What if the company goes bankrupt and instead of 20 000 people losing their job, 130 000 will lose their job?

Is France somehow guaranteeing that France Telecom will not go bankrupt no matter how much looses and dept they generate?

Could someone explain this concept to me? I genuinely don't understand how this was/is supposed to work.

lmm2• 7 years ago

Hiring a person is seen as a big commitment. You're asking that person to uproot their life for you (e.g. they might well move home to be in the right place to do your job), they expect a similar commitment from you in return (one could draw an analogy to e.g. marriage). You don't just drop them at the first sign of trouble: you can fire for cause if the employee is actually doing something wrong, but as long as they keep working and you stay in business you're expected to keep paying them. So yes, that might mean keeping them on doing work that they're overqualified for, or where another company in the market might have a better use for their time, or in the worst case continuing to pay them when there's simply no work for them to do. (Though in practice you'd probably negotiate e.g. an early retirement package in that case).

It's a nicer way to live, not having to fear that you might be kicked to the curb at any given month. No doubt it comes at a cost to economic growth, but it's important to remember that the economy exists to improve human lives, not the other way round.

Isinlor3• 7 years ago

So what happens if a company goes bankrupt?

It's a big catastrophe to have to fire 20 000 people, but if that means keeping 110 000 people employed, the decision would seem straightforward to me.

How do companies avoid bankruptcy in this type of situation?

BTW - My parents and grandparents lived through communism, with not only guaranteed, but enforced full employment, but they would argue that it was not a nicer way to live.

Cynddl2• 7 years ago

In France, such contracts do not imply that a company cannot fire employees. Contracts can be terminated for economical reason, which however needs to be justified.

If your company is working well, should you be able to downsize and fire employees without a clear motive? To a certain degree, France believes the answer is no.

Isinlor3• 7 years ago

What you write makes sense, or is at least reasonable to a point where I can believe that people genuinely think so.

But my question is then, why the company did not argue that they need to fire these 22 000 workers without resorting to shady methods?

"Company executives thought they needed to get rid of 22,000 workers out of 130,000 — a necessity contested by the prosecution — to ensure survival."

Was there some additional cost to triggering mechanism you describe?

Former top executives of France Télécom on trial for harassing employees

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