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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 wor

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.

ridaj 7y 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 7y 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 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".
  - throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
    I don’t think it is. The problem with that statement is that leaving a country is a huge transition, with plenty of costs, and unclear rewards. Leaving a job is sometimes a big deal, but it’s never as serious. One could argue that the more serious it is for your the greater the problem in question is because you don’t have any skills deemed valuable by your current employer or potential employers. What to do with useless white collar labor is a hard problem. Mistreating people is a bad idea, but you need to do “something” otherwise you’ll eventually just go out of business if firing them is not an option. Globalism is hard.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    > That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. Literally right after the bit you quoted.
- throwno 7y ago
  According to the article, in France public employees have "jobs for life", so the only way to downsize the workforce was to harass them to death. Isn't socialism wonderful?
- grecy 7y 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_fr 7y 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 7y 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.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    How does that 35 compare to the base population rate of suicide? If it’s within a small margin, I’d conclude that’s a pretty solid display that people are people and some decide to kill themselves.
    - capitol_ 7y ago
      If we start with the assumption that harrasment cause suicides then that argument means that it's ok to harras people as much as others do on average. Obviously there is other causes also. But the base principel is a very shaky foundation to build a legal framework on.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        Why start with the assumption that harassment causes suicide? We could just as well start with the assumption that vaccines cause autism. We should use our intuition to ask questions rather than to answer them.
    - ridaj 7y ago
      This is, in essence, the argument that the CEO made, during the crisis and at the trial. He kept saying (paraphrasing here) that there was no statically significant increase in the rate of suicides, and because the company was so huge it was bound to have employees killing themselves from time to time, regardless of what management did or didn't do. According to him, the whole affair was a pure media campaign orchestrated by people who disagreed with his management of the company. The incredibly insensitive delivery of this argument cost the man his job years ago. The immense grief of families and coworkers, the fact that the suicides appeared to be work-related (and sometimes even happening at the workplace), the scathing reports by medical inspectors seemed all irrelevant to the dude, who basically just looked at this as a statistic to be managed. His lack of public displays of empathy or desire for introspection was pretty disturbing.
- dredmorbius 7y 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book) https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSociology2005/page/n3 https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci... The problem with a suicide cluster isn't in determining the cause. It's the fact itself.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    There's also genetic predilections for suicide.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Those are exceedingly unlikely to 1) create variances over time or 2) company-specific clusters. The broader concept is itself well-addressed in Durkheim's book in terms of regional and cultural variances in base rates.
jariel 7y 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.
- Yoric 7y 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 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?
TwoBit 7y ago
Well in the US the execs would be rewarded. At least 30 less employees.
glogla 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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-desmarais/ https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/dynasties-6-the-desma...
Spooky23 7y 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 7y ago
The workers chose to work there and chose to kill themselves. Do we not expect people to have agency anymore?

ridaj 7y 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 7y 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 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".
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  I don’t think it is. The problem with that statement is that leaving a country is a huge transition, with plenty of costs, and unclear rewards. Leaving a job is sometimes a big deal, but it’s never as serious. One could argue that the more serious it is for your the greater the problem in question is because you don’t have any skills deemed valuable by your current employer or potential employers. What to do with useless white collar labor is a hard problem. Mistreating people is a bad idea, but you need to do “something” otherwise you’ll eventually just go out of business if firing them is not an option. Globalism is hard.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  > That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. Literally right after the bit you quoted.
throwno 7y ago
According to the article, in France public employees have "jobs for life", so the only way to downsize the workforce was to harass them to death. Isn't socialism wonderful?
grecy 7y 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_fr 7y 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 7y 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.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  How does that 35 compare to the base population rate of suicide? If it’s within a small margin, I’d conclude that’s a pretty solid display that people are people and some decide to kill themselves.
  - capitol_ 7y ago
    If we start with the assumption that harrasment cause suicides then that argument means that it's ok to harras people as much as others do on average. Obviously there is other causes also. But the base principel is a very shaky foundation to build a legal framework on.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Why start with the assumption that harassment causes suicide? We could just as well start with the assumption that vaccines cause autism. We should use our intuition to ask questions rather than to answer them.
  - ridaj 7y ago
    This is, in essence, the argument that the CEO made, during the crisis and at the trial. He kept saying (paraphrasing here) that there was no statically significant increase in the rate of suicides, and because the company was so huge it was bound to have employees killing themselves from time to time, regardless of what management did or didn't do. According to him, the whole affair was a pure media campaign orchestrated by people who disagreed with his management of the company. The incredibly insensitive delivery of this argument cost the man his job years ago. The immense grief of families and coworkers, the fact that the suicides appeared to be work-related (and sometimes even happening at the workplace), the scathing reports by medical inspectors seemed all irrelevant to the dude, who basically just looked at this as a statistic to be managed. His lack of public displays of empathy or desire for introspection was pretty disturbing.
dredmorbius 7y 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book) https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSociology2005/page/n3 https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci... The problem with a suicide cluster isn't in determining the cause. It's the fact itself.
- dnautics 7y ago
  There's also genetic predilections for suicide.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Those are exceedingly unlikely to 1) create variances over time or 2) company-specific clusters. The broader concept is itself well-addressed in Durkheim's book in terms of regional and cultural variances in base rates.

jariel 7y 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.

Yoric 7y 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 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?

TwoBit 7y ago

Well in the US the execs would be rewarded. At least 30 less employees.

glogla 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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-desmarais/ https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/dynasties-6-the-desma...

Spooky23 7y 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 7y ago

The workers chose to work there and chose to kill themselves. Do we not expect people to have agency anymore?