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French executives convicted in the suicides of 35 of their workers
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- astatine 7y agoIt'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 7y agoGenerally speaking, the harder it is to fire someone, the more reluctant a company will be to hire someone.
- Iv 7y agoI 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.
- brmgb 7y agoThe great paradox of France is that people keep believing it's hard to fire there while it's not. Every government for the past thirty years have made firing easier. You have an up to eight months window of at-will before the protections kick in and they are mostly severance compensation which rises with the duration of your employment. You have to have a cause but these are plentyful. If you can agree with your employee it's time to part, you don't even need to fire them. There is a legal way to commonly agree to break the contract which closes judicial recourse from the employee. When companies in France complain they can't fire, what they actually mean is that they can't do it for free. Personally it doesn't make me too sad.
- BrandoElFollito 7y agoPast the probation period even if you want to pay firing is not easy. Sure you can use contractual statements (such as that the work can be anywhere in France) but short of harassment there is no easy way out. If you fire someone out means that you are shutting down the position. The court will not be happy if it was a fake shutdown. A middle ground such as the specific laws for first employment (which did not pass) child be a middle ground.
- Iv 7y agoI keep moving one side or the other on this issue. I think there is a philosophical difference in the way companies and employees are seen in France vs US. I often feel (from discussions here, but American friends told me the views are more varied in a representative sample of the US population) that in the US companies are seen as an extension of their owners' will. Do what you want on a whim. Want to close a profitable company to just cash in everything and buy a yacht? You own it, you can do it. In France companies owners that do have employees are more considered like caretakers of a piece of the national production and are expected to be responsible of the piece of economy they grabbed (or, arguable, were allowed to grab). So yes, if you think you can be a worthy contributor to the economy, you are allowed to grab a piece of it and keep a nice part to yourself, but in exchange there are rules for you to be responsible about it, like not creating jobs that may be unsustainable and depriving sustainable companies from labor. In France you can fire employees for reasons, but you need reasons better than a whim. If you have a good reason (the employee broke important rules, or the law, refuses to do their work), it is free. If it is for performances or economic reasons, well you made a hiring mistake and it is going to cost you, but a reasonable amount. I am not sure it is bad. The French economy performs pretty well when you go past the headlines and look at the numbers. I don't think that model is the drag we make it look like.
- BrandoElFollito 7y agoI think you are very correct in your analysis. There is also some kind of close relationship between job and personal life (at least in the tech companies I worked in). For instance we will be careful when planning to take into account school holidays. Or the company will make arrangements on day one at school so that parents can be late (the ones who had to bring their children to school). Everybody understand that teachers are a civilization on their own and that a meeting with a parent at 16:30 is normal. So companies adapt. There are many more similar situations.
- philjohn 7y agoGot some cold hard facts to back up that assertion?
- ridaj 7y agoIn 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.
- AdrianB1 7y agoIn 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?
- ridaj 7y agoI didn't mean it's a management failure. The company was really put in a precarious position when it was spun off from government without change to employees' job-for-life statutory protections. With lots of debt piled on by previous management, management was not dealt a winning hand. Although the next set of execs managed to continue the turnaround. But yes, otherwise there are many other options besides downsizing, such as retraining or entering new markets geographically or vertically, all of which (to their credit) the same set of folks pursued as well. Similarly silicon valley companies are constantly threatened by obsolescence. I think today Facebook and Google would both be dead if they hadn't retrained a significant share of their workforce on mobile development a few years ago, and machine learning more recently.
- hrktb 7y agoFiring 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 7y 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.
- perl4ever 7y agoNo, 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 7y agoLombard (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-sentences/french-telco-orange-and-ex-ceo-found-guilty-over-workers-suicides-idUSKBN1YO12D https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-justice-orange-sen...
- Yoric 7y ago(also, I think most people missed your pun :) )
- 1996 7y agoIt'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.
- errantspark 7y agoAnyone 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.
- ridaj 7y agoThey were not prosecuted for the suicides themselves, which the judge considered to have multiple causes. They were only prosecuted for institutional harassment.
- shaki-dora 7y agoAll 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 7y 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".
- Geimfari 7y ago30 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13204168
- djrobstep 7y agoIrrelevant 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 7y agoYou 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/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/839621/PHE_Suicide_Cluster_Guide.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- denzil_correa 7y ago32 reported suicides in 32,000 people whose jobs were affected.
- rolltiide 7y agoIs France crazy or are we the bad guys?
- michaelborromeo 7y agoWhen 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 7y agoYou 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.
- Yoric 7y agoOne 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.
- BrandoElFollito 7y ago
- anm89 7y agoIs 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 7y agoThe second (institutional harassment).
- bagels 7y agoI wish the article gave examples of what this harassment constituted of. It is hard to fathom what specifically they must have been doing.
- Yoric 7y agoI 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 7y agoCan 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.
- vertex-four 7y agoFinding another job is not easy for many people. I've been looking for work (not in France) for years - even getting an interview is difficult, and I have very poor interview skills (autism spectrum disorder makes it particularly hard to learn how to interview) so I don't get anywhere. Not everyone is in a market where companies are desperate for warm bodies.
- boyadjian 7y agoThat 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_fr 7y agoYou 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.
- Yoric 7y agoActually, in most cases, it's not that difficult. You need to expect a fairly large severance paycheck, though.
- AdrianB1 7y agoThat can close a company that is already in a bad situation, is it?
- robsinatra 7y agoExecutives 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.
- TheNorthman 7y agoIt'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 7y 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?
- gallexme 7y agoWhere 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 7y ago“held to account” “$83,000” Choose one. That’s not punishment, that’s a pat on the back.