French executives convicted in the suicides of 35 of their workers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/12/20/three-french-executives-were-convicted-suicides-their-workers/

by andrewl • 7 years ago

149 115 7 years ago

astatine• 7 years ago

It's a sad story that I remember from years ago. I wonder how much the rigid rules that France has on employee firing contribute to this.

I am aware of an employer's view in a different case where (in a small company) an employee was asked to leave for poor performance. The process dragged for so long that the employee was paid full salary for close to 15 months without ever coming to office during this period. The company closed shop.

WalterBright• 7 years ago

Generally speaking, the harder it is to fire someone, the more reluctant a company will be to hire someone.

Iv2• 7 years ago

I think most French would be happy to switch to a system where it is easy to fire, as long as the social net was good. Thing is, these two things (strengthening the safety net and making the labor laws more flexible) are defended by different parties. The few that have pretended to do this transition ended up just removing labor law protections.

philjohn• 7 years ago

Got some cold hard facts to back up that assertion?

ridaj6• 7 years ago

In this case, many of the employees were civil servants who were statutorily guaranteed a job as part of the bargain they made with the government decades ago when the company was just a department of the administration.

Regardless, I don't think one can blame the rules. Executives in every difficult business would otherwise have an excuse to blame the law. If the company had failed due to management's inability to downsize as needed, the state would have likely have had to recapitalize the company.

AdrianB13• 7 years ago

In all telecom companies at some point there was a transition to digitization, reducing the need of employees per subscriber; that is an increase of productivity, not a management failure: if you need only half of the employees to provide the same services, what is the management supposed to do with the other half? At one point manual operators at the switching boards simply become obsolete, what can management do?

hrktb• 7 years ago

Firing for poor performance is easy enough when you can prove the low performance and reluctance to improve.

The more it gets touchy feely, the harder it gets: for instance the goals you set were blurry or contestable, you don’t have any track record of how the employee has been doing until you wanted to fire them, the improvement plan you set up is properly followed but you still want to get rid of them etc.

I’ve seen someone basically fired on the spot for critical fault, and another worker let go after a first warning, a 3 month recovery plan and not reaching the goal agreed upon (set on the base of the other employees goal at the same pay level). It’s really not outlandish, and it takes you 3 months to fire your employer, needing 3 months to fire an employee is fair enough.

elamje• 7 years ago

"The company, France Télécom — which used to be state-owned and is now known as Orange, one of France’s largest corporations — was fined $83,000, the maximum penalty."

Nice.

perl4ever2• 7 years ago

No, Paris.

But you leave out the four months in prison for the CEO which is something. It's not clear from the wording whether he was the only one imprisoned.

rasalas• 7 years ago

Lombard (the CEO) won't actually be in prison.

"Yet since that term is under two years and as Lombard does not present a danger to society, he will not spend time behind bars under French court rules." [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-justice-orange-sen...

Yoric15• 7 years ago

(also, I think most people missed your pun :) )

1996• 7 years ago

It's like, what, 6 month of pay.

Considering 2 people died, and this slap on the wrist is 6 month of wages, divide by two and that's 3 month pay for every dead worker.

Will the executive have to pay out of their pocket? If so, each executive can have up to 4 dead workers per year before having to worry -- not even taking bonuses in account!

Europe never ceases to amaze me.

paggle• 7 years ago

Europe? Where is corporate crime punished effectively? With decades long prison sentences for the responsible executives?

wongarsu• 7 years ago

If so, each executive can have up to 4 dead workers per year before having to worry

A smart executive will have some money set aside, but in general losing your entire wage is something most people would be very worried about

errantspark• 7 years ago

Anyone else feel like they're on crazy pills? How is engineering a culture so toxic it causes dozens of people to kill themselves specifically to circumvent worker protections worth only what amounts to the punishment of a speeding ticket or other minor transgression for a poor person (proportionally)?

Like I get it, I should be glad an executive was held to account for anything. But this is a tiny step and we got a looong way to go before we get to liberté, égalité, fraternité.

It seems that with great power comes great wealth and an almost complete lack of accountability.

I would like to live in a world where the link between power and responsibility was much more aggressively enforced. I've worked in places where corners were cut constantly, endangering workers in pursuit of the bottom line, I'm sure it's more or less the norm. The executives shouldn't be able to sleep at night for fear of the complete destruction of their lives for their transgressions. It should be life in prison with no possibility of parole, not a fine.

Even something like buying an SUV should map to greater punishments. It's well known that you're much more likely to kill a pedestrian with a car that has a high grille. The law should enforce a greater level of responsibility on the people who chose to inflict greater risk on the lives of others.

ridaj6• 7 years ago

They were not prosecuted for the suicides themselves, which the judge considered to have multiple causes. They were only prosecuted for institutional harassment.

shaki-dora• 7 years ago

All employees are free to leave... That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. But the specific outcome here, I. s. suicide, is fiendishly difficult link to any one cause.

The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?

speedplane• 7 years ago

All employees are free to leave...

That's a pretty poor excuse for misbehavior. Similar to "if you don't like this country, you should leave".

grecy• 7 years ago

All employees are free to leave...

You're literally saying "This job is a necessary part of our society, and while you personally might not want to tolerate the {harassment/low pay/terrible conditions}, someone else has to."

alexis_fr2• 7 years ago

Employees are free to leave

Those jobs were civil servants with lifetime job guarantee in what was, at the time of hiring, a public company.

Of course the whole question is how to transition to private company with private employment, but that doesn’t cancel the fact that civil servants had made serious concessions to get a lifetime job (lower grade than what they could get in the private sector after their diploma, in exchange for lifetime security), which artificially put them in a weak negotiation position (few savings, mental dedication to only one speciality).

baot• 7 years ago

I'd consider 35 people who felt that suicide was better than leaving is a pretty solid display of why that argument doesn't work.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

A foundational text of sociology is Durkheim's Suicide, based precisely on the premise that the act itself is undeniable, that bodies are very hard to hide, and that the motivations, if not an extreme of altruism, are an extreme of either loss of social context (individuation), or complete hopelessness (fatalism).

Suicide has been chosen as its subject, among the various subjects that we have had occasion to study in our teaching career, because few are more accurately to be defined.... Suicide as it exists today is precisely one of the forms through which the collective affection from which we suffer is transmitted; thus it will aid us to understand this.... [I]n common terms, suicide is pre-eminently the desperate act of one who does not care to live.

Moreover, of population suicide rates:

Not only is this rate constant for long periods, but its invariability is even greater than that of leading demographic data.

That is, deviations from norm are intrinsically significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book)

https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci...

The problem with a suicide cluster isn't in determining the cause. It's the fact itself.

jariel4• 7 years ago

What is 'crazy pills; is that any reasonable person would hold them accountable for this.

This is populist lynching.

First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.

It's a huge misrepresentation to talk about a 'rash of suicides' that's just about the statistical norm.

Second - having lived and worked in France, I can assure you that workplaces are generally not toxic nearly to the degree that you see in the USA. The hours are short, and vacations are long.

In France employees literally kidnap managers by blockading them in their offices with furniture during union negotiations.

Third - is the degree to which negative work conditions actually affect life outcomes. So it's clear there were several policies in place that were not very nice - but this happens all the time in the world. An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.

If a factory closes and employees are laid off, does the business then become responsible if people kill themselves over it? No.

What needs to happen here is an investigation into what actually happened, to try to fix the issues in a reasonable way.

Instead - we got a kangaroo court.

French workers and management have been in a really tense standoff now for a couple of decades (well, leftover from a few hundred years ago) and it's not going well.

I literally live in an are of Montreal where tons of young, educated people are moving because the French system in their words is 'breaking down'. Few people believe in the work, it's very risky to hire people because they can't be let go, taxes are insanely high (>50% income tax after a 24% employment tax), systematically high levels of inequality and a serious problem with integration of new migrants that has little parallel in North America.

This was a political answer to a problem that needs real solutions.

Yoric15• 7 years ago

Third - is the degree to which negative work conditions actually affect life outcomes. So it's clear there were several policies in place that were not very nice - but this happens all the time in the world. An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.
If a factory closes and employees are laid off, does the business then become responsible if people kill themselves over it? No.

A common (mis)management technique used in France is called "placardisation" (literally "put someone in the closet"). Rather than laying off people, drive them to nervous breakdown and ensure that they quit. I've survived this once and I can tell you that it's not pretty. That's the kind of practice that was being tried.

(I've written something a bit more detailed in another comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21856307 )

Instead - we got a kangaroo court.

The investigation lasted years. What makes you claim that it's a kangaroo court?

axlee• 7 years ago

taxes are insanely high (>50% income tax after a 24% employment tax)

This is a lie. The top bracket is at 45% above €156.244. This means it is mathematically impossible to pay more than 45% in income taxes, let alone more than 50%.

systematically high levels of inequality

Yes, there is, but France has a lower Gini index than Canada, so hearing that criticism coming from expats to that country is a bit hypocritical.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

ridaj6• 7 years ago

This is populist lynching.

How so? It seems to have been an orderly trial.

First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.

One could argue with this characterization that Lombard himself made all the time. But at any rate, they weren't prosecuted for the suicides, only for institutional harassment.

An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.

This is indeed what Orange did in every other country but France. You can look up what happened in Poland to TPSA for example, and it took place everywhere else.

Orange was not able to do layoffs in France because of statutory employment guarantees provided to much of the civil servant workforce.

One can certainly disagree with such a policy — it is nuts to guarantee jobs for life in an industry where the jobs 10 years from now are completely different from the jobs to do now — but it is another thing to use a disagreement with this policy in order to justify rolling out harassment techniques as a way to downsize. It's like faulting the employees for taking a good deal decades ago — the government didn't have to offer the deal back then.

There have to be limits to management's ability to instill a climate of fear, as the consequences are real (not talking specifically about the suicides here, as the policy had many other negative outcomes).

denzil_correa4• 7 years ago

First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.

There were 35 suicides in ~ 32,000 workers, not 100,000.

glogla• 7 years ago

It's ridiculous.

Why is hurting one person with a knife to get wallet punished more than hurting tens of thousands of people to get better results in Excel?

It's obvious that if you're rich, you get away with anything and the justice system is just a farce.

dondawest• 7 years ago

One crime is legible to the masses, the other is not. The crimes are in no way parallel.

Agree the justice system is a farce .

username90• 7 years ago

Muggers don't bring lower prices, numbers in excel sheets does. Your average consumer will accept a mountain of skeletons in the closet if it comes with 10% lower prices.

mbar84• 7 years ago

I very vaguely remember a story, (though I can't remember which company, but since it's probably corporate propaganda that's fine anyway).

The story goes that you have a company with lots of industrial manufacturing facilities distributed across the country. In one of them there is an accident which leads to the death of workers.

As soon as possible, the big boss at the main office orders the plant manager to fly over and when the manager enters the office, the boss asks "Why did you kill these men?" The manager is flusters and protests they did everything they could, was not to blame, etc. etc.

I don't know if the manager was fired or demoted, but if he wasn't that sends a message through the organization that you can fk up or be negligent and still keep your job.

Anyway, the point is that all of this is a top down corporate culture problem. If the highest level doesn't understand that they are responsible for this, and if they don't enforce a culture of responsibility all the way down the line, then you will get outcomes like at France Télécom or much worse a culture like at Union Carbide that lead to the Bhopal disaster.

Looking at the Bhopal disaster I guess you could say it's also an external accountability problem. If there's not some external entity like a government to hold the company and executives liable, or an insurance company that makes them pay through the nose if they are negligent, then the quarterly earnings cycle will lead to increased risk for employees.

Insurance premiums are perhaps a more practical way to set the right incentives, as they give much more immediate feedback than intermittent disasters. If executives can point to safety measures they have taken and the reduction in premiums that were enabled by that, then perhaps even the most narrow-mindedly short term profit seeking execs/board members/shareholders will do what is right for the safety of employees.

graeme• 7 years ago

Sounds like you're thinking of Paul O'Neill and Alcoa. He figured out that worker safety was a proxy for a whole bunch of other metrics at Alcoa.

He had everyone focus intensely on safety. Worker accidents went down massively. As a byproduct, costs went down and productivity went up.

Any serious incident has to be reported up, was investigated, and was treated very seriously.

Note that while this likely generalizes to other places, it doesn't necessarily generalize to every place. I could conceive of some setups where safety and profits were opposed. But in Alcoa's case, O'Neill was able to use safety as a driver for other changes.

zouhair• 7 years ago

The problem is that those who make the laws are the same than those who have the money or are really close friends.

As long as there is no janitors running for office, not much will happen. People will forget soon enough.

Check the Desmarais family[0].

[0] https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/dynasties-6-the-desma...

Spooky23• 7 years ago

You don’t need to even go that far.

One place I did a little work for had some safety culture problems in the field services teams, especially with digging equipment. The culture was very focused on grilling the employees in why they screwed up. New management came in and basically made the foremen and managers do a bunch of postmortem reviews and made them generally uncomfortable by making them accountable. Incidents went down dramatically, eventually going to near-zero after about 3 years.

In a more white collar setting, imo these issues are about people who rule by fear, either because that is how they are managed, or because they lack the competence to work any other way.

RomanBob• 7 years ago

The workers chose to work there and chose to kill themselves.

Do we not expect people to have agency anymore?

Geimfari• 7 years ago

30 reported suicides in 2008–2009 in a company employing 100,000 people. This is a suicide rate equivalent to France's average national suicide rate.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13204168

djrobstep• 7 years ago

Irrelevant if you're not adjusting properly for demographic factors.

And even if the company suicide rate were no higher than average, thats simply an indication that immiserating employment conditions are widespread and commonplace.

Anybody who has ever worked a terrible job can tell you all about how it might make you feel suicidal.

DanBC• 7 years ago

You may want to read about the concept of "suicide clusters" which seem to the relevant to the deaths at Orange.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

denzil_correa4• 7 years ago

32 reported suicides in 32,000 people whose jobs were affected.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

Is France crazy or are we the bad guys?

michaelborromeo• 7 years ago

When you have an immovable object (can’t fire an employee due to law) up against an unstoppable force (economic pressure to cut jobs) you get actions that try to bend either of the above constraints.

In the end something had to break — either the company or the people or both.

No one forced these people to either work at the company or to commit suicide.

Yes their pensions were linked to their jobs but is quitting and losing your retirement better than death?

Or maybe they wanted to be martyrs and knew this would lead to a punishment for the executives.

yborg• 7 years ago

You speak as if the company's executives were compelled by some force to make their workers lives miserable. They also were not forced to remain in their positions and could have chosen to resign (thus saving the company their compensation) rather than engage in immoral actions. That they chose to do so to maintain their own positions and compensation seems worthy of punishment.

Yoric15• 7 years ago

One thing you probably underestimate is that the relationship between employer and employee is very different in France wrt, say, UK/US/Canada.

France has something called "job loyalty." After the ~6 months trial period, a good employee will typically never quit their job, because this would be breaking a bond that is nearly as strong as that of marriage. The employer is, of course, expected to do treat employees as best as possible. If economic pressure forces the employer to lay off people, this is a reality of life, and France has laws that forces the employer to make it happen in a humane manner (i.e. fairly large severance check, among other things).

Here, managers decided to cut out on their side of the deal by employing "placardisation", i.e. bullying people out of their job, i.e. bringing these people to nervous breakdown. But culturally, these people couldn't quit. They could only hope that their managers would be replaced by better managers.

So when you're saying that "No one forced these people to either work at the company or to commit suicide" – well, yes, they were forced because that's how everybody is raised in France.

BrandoElFollito4• 7 years ago

This is all correct and true, but is also changing, especially in tech.

In other areas this is still very much the case.

adev_• 7 years ago

So when you're saying that "No one forced these people to either work at the company or to commit suicide" – well, yes, they were forced because that's how everybody is raised in France.

That is very true.

It was even more true in national companies like France Telecom where it was a personal achievement for many to be there.

Often positions in these companies where even family thing, where your family except you to be part of when you are old enough.

ldng3• 7 years ago

They could fire them if they wanted, they'd only had to PAY for it. Harassing was just CHEAPER.

anm89• 7 years ago

Is it legally accurate that they are being convicted for the suicides of the workers implying they were the cause or are they being convicted of some other violation which may have lead to worker suicides.

The first sounds insane. The second sounds reasonable.

Can't read the article because of the paywall.

ramchip• 7 years ago

The second (institutional harassment).

bagels• 7 years ago

I wish the article gave examples of what this harassment constituted of. It is hard to fathom what specifically they must have been doing.

Yoric15• 7 years ago

I don't know about this specific case, but I can give you examples in other companies. Some of them were things I lived through "thanks" to a former boss of mine who's still lurking on HN so hello, former boss.

1. Move someone's desk to (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively) a closet: a place where they don't see anyone.

2. Set someone to watch them. Make sure that they can't speak to anyone during the day. Make sure that they are always at their desk. If they're not, for any reason, make sure to blame them.

3. Repeat them three times per day that they are doing a piss-poor job.

4. But also make sure that they have nothing to do. Make-believe job at best, but it must be clear to them that it's make-believe job. Once they have produced their deliverables, ignore these entirely.

5. Set them up to fail. Give them impossible deadlines. Change the goalposts. Give them a title and responsibilities that looks like they have entire teams working for them but never fill the teams.

6. Force you to write daily reports of activities when everybody else is on weekly/monthly/quarterly/... basis.

7. But also repeat to them that they're not working sufficiently. Make it clear to them that it's their fault.

etc.

privateSFacct• 7 years ago

Can I ask briefly what kept you spending such a significant portion of your day working for such an employer? Is this is in the US or somewhere else where maybe there is a forced work period? In the US at least your employer generally cannot force you to keep working for them but I know other places in the mideast etc they can.

blondin• 7 years ago

wow! those aren't tech companies, are they?

kdeldycke• 7 years ago

Thanks @Yoric for speaking out. I suffered from a similar situation early in my career as a developer, and it was far from pleasant.

This happened in a very early stage, self-founded startup in France (was the third person to join). Took me time to realize the situation was really bad and unescapable: I was young and lacking experience.

To employees: don't wait to be fired or to reach your breaking point. You're on the way to serious burnout. There is something out there called the market that is redistributing talents. So get out.

To managers: don’t be that boss.

boyadjian• 7 years ago

That situation is the consequence of too protective laws for working in France. In France, it is very difficult to fire someone, so it leads to problems when you want to decrease the number of staff.

alexis_fr2• 7 years ago

You are right for private employment, but those people were hired under public servant contracts in a public company at the time, with lifetime employment guarantee.

So you are correct, employment is too protected, both in private and public sector, but in addition, the state promises too much. I have seen so many public servants being harassed and/or depressed because they didn’t fit/like their job, that I confirm lifetime jobs make no-one happy.

Yoric15• 7 years ago

Actually, in most cases, it's not that difficult. You need to expect a fairly large severance paycheck, though.

AdrianB13• 7 years ago

That can close a company that is already in a bad situation, is it?

robsinatra• 7 years ago

Executives at a French company couldn't treat people as resources and fire at will because France has employee protection laws (sounds good but only in theory). So, the executives made employees miserable, intending to push them to quit. Instead, employees killed themselves. You want to fire people but you can't, so what do you do? Make them not want to be there anymore.

There is a case to be made that these employees would have killed themselves if they were fired. This is an important distinction because it's the loss of employment, not harassment, that lead to suicide.

It's crazy to think that there are people here who will read this and think that with this given, firing should be illegal and executives charged for manslaughter. You are thinking dangerously and need to study history. Or, you are French and there is no difference.

TheNorthman2• 7 years ago

It's crazy to to think that people are still suggesting people to "study history", as though history is a homogeneous mass that can even be studied as a whole.

It's crazy to think that history is uniformly in favor of the executive class. That somehow the brutality of the elites can be justified by their understanding of history. That they can't be deferred to some broader concept of morality because they have history on their side. This argument is the same as the one made by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man and it is fundamentally flawed in the same way.

Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history. Let us never neglect this obvious, macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable, singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.

tome• 7 years ago

Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth

And have they ever affected a smaller proportion of human beings in recorded history?

Yoric15• 7 years ago

Pray tell, what part of history?

gallexme• 7 years ago

Where can I read this article with my phone without paying?

Also is there a way to offer to write an automatic link converter(for free) for hacker news?

tdsamardzhiev• 7 years ago

“held to account”

“$83,000”

Choose one. That’s not punishment, that’s a pat on the back.

French executives convicted in the suicides of 35 of their workers

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