A tear drop of capitalism - The tragedy of employees of French telecom

16 Jan 2010

France Telecom, the former state monopoly, now Europe's third-biggest phone company, has seen its brand name Orange has come under public scrutiny after 22 workers committed suicide and another 13 attempted to kill themselves since the start of last year.One man had stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting while a woman threw herself out a window.


Unions are demanding a parliamentary inquiry into the deaths, which they blame on stress linked to massive restructuring at the company, involving forced transfers and the introduction of new profit targets. "The crisis at France Telecom is now a national problem," said the Force Ouvriere and CFTC unions in a joint statement.

Resignation of chief executive:
The deputy chief executive of France Telecom resigned in October 2009 in the wake of a spate of staff suicides that unions have blamed on a bullying management style and brutal approach to restructuring.

Tragedy of Stephanie – Just one example of many cases
The controversy over the spate of suicides took a macabre turn with the publication of a suicide letter sent by the latest employee to die.

"I'm going to become the 23rd staff member to commit suicide," 32-year-old Stephanie wrote in an email sent to her father just moments before she flung herself out of her fourth storey office window. “I'm leaving my handbag with my mobiles and keys in the office, but I'll take my donor card with me, you never know.” Her father passed the final communication to Paris Match magazine, which published it in full.

"When I called you this morning, you said I didn't seem quite right. You were right. My suicidal impulses are taking over again. I've decided to act upon them tonight," the Parisian law graduate wrote.

The note was sent at 5.10pm on September 11, 2009. Minutes later, Stephanie dropped from her office window in a French Telecom client services office in Paris. Critically wounded, she died two hours later.

Story of many others:
One worker this summer wrote about the company’s “lack of training” and “management by terror” in his note, stating his inability to further cope with the job as the reason for ending his life.An email message sent by a 32-year-old woman to her father before she jumped from a fifth-floor window at work said she was committing suicide because she didn’t want to work with a new boss.

‘Recession’ – the evil businessmen’s excuse?
It has been a difficult year. The pressure of financial uncertainty, job insecurity, heavier workloads due to smaller teams and now the added demands that will be placed on us as we move towards recovery, are all mounting up.

Forty-one percent of French respondents said they felt stressed, and 54% said it was because of the current economic crisis, according to an April telephone poll by the French National Agency for the Improvement of Working Conditions.

The current economic crisis is probably an aggravating factor, but does not account for the rise in job stress over the last 15 to 20 years. It has closely followed a "qualitative jump" in work- and stress-linked "psycho-social" illnesses observed across the French workforce. Christophe Dejours, a leading French psychiatrist and researcher on work-induced illness and suicides said the illnesses "are linked to a steep increase in overall intensification of work."

The technology based work culture killing work-life balance:
Pellissier said some employees were clearly feeling a lot of pressure due to the privatisation of France Telecom, but he added that this was compounded by new technologies that cause work to encroach increasingly on personal lives.

"When you were an average employee in a big corporation 15 years ago, you had no mobile phone or no PC at home. When you were back home, work was out," he said.

Research in Motion's popular BlackBerry has been dubbed CrackBerry in the United States, where some users say they are addicted to checking emails. Pellissier said such practices may be taking a bigger toll on workers than has been acknowledged by his company or others. As a result a fragile employee with difficulties would probably have more confusion with "more mixture between personal life and professional life than in the past".

The new strategy - Moral harassment:
Employees have cited “moral harassment” as one tactic used to pressure workers who are unable to adapt to quit. Job descriptions change at a frenetic pace and workers have complained of being constantly supervised. Employees are working more and more, giving more of themselves and are not seeing recognition for their efforts, said Dejours, the psychiatrist.

But at what price?
An atmosphere where people formerly worked in teams and relied on each other for support has become an isolating place where people have had to adopt an attitude of “every man for himself,” a shift that can lead to fear, mistrust and backstabbing among employees.
“Now, what you have is more competition among workers,” Dejours said. “When an evaluation is linked to sanctions, whether positive or negative, this leads very quickly to people turning on each other.”

Respect and all forms of solidarity are destroyed, Dejours said, and everyone is left alone to confront the pressures, big and small. When a person feels harassed at work, he is less likely to confide in colleagues or seek help. “It is a kind of great loneliness that settles in the workplace," he said.

Facing the reality of capitalism:
With the France Telecom suicides as a backdrop, French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently said he wanted the world to change its production-obsessed measure of national wealth.

In September, he argued for a new international economic indicator of wealth based less on gross domestic product and more on "well-being" cultivated through leisure and social benefits, among others.

The idea for the "alternative wealth indicator" came from a government-commissioned study led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, with another Nobel economics winner, Amartya Sen, as advisor.

The need of development based on Eastern values:
The West is now repent on their extreme capitalist economic model which is based on extreme passion and aggression, should we blindly follow their foot steps or build a nation based on our Eastern values?

Lets all of us together build a country with greenery and culture, a nation without fear and hunger.

References:
- Boss blames smartphones for stress as company suicide rate comes under scrutiny (Sep 25, 2009. The Sydney Morning Herald)
- France Telecom executive resigns after employee suicide tally rises to 24 (Oct 05, 2009. The Guardian)
- Why France Telecom employees are killing themselves (Oct 10, 2009. Global Post)
- Suicides force French to confront rise in work-related stress (Nov 01, 2009. Los Angalese Times)
- Hazards,org

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