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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 fiendishl

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.

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.