Former Telecom CEO Convicted for Making Working Conditions So Bad 35 Workers Killed Themselves
The former CEO of France's largest telecommunications company, as well as two subordinates, were sentenced to four months in prison and a $16,000 fine for making working conditions so terrible that 35 employees committed suicide, according to the New York Times.
The former CEO, Didier Lombard, along with his second in command, Louis-Pierre Wenès, and the former HR director, Olivier Barberot, were all found guilty of "institutional moral harassment," a crime that is functionally similar to anti-workplace bullying laws in the United States. Legal literature says that it can encompass abusive communications and actions such as sexual harassment and violence; destruction of an employee's status at work, such as through public humiliation or sabotage; or degrading assignments like useless tasks, tasks for which the employee is unqualified or no tasks.
According to the Associated Press, the trial focused on 39 cases between 2006 and 2009—19 suicides, 12 suicide attempts and eight cases of serious depression. Other employee suicides couldn't be linked directly and solely with their work.
The case involved an effort by the three men to cut 22,000 jobs and move another 14,000 workers after the former national telecom, France Telecom, became a private entity in 2004. An internal document found that the CEO said he would do this one way or another whether "through the window or through the door." An article from 2009 in the United Kingdom's Independent noted that French labor laws make it difficult to do these kinds of mass firings, and so the company is said to have turned to bullying tactics to make working there so unbearable that people would just decide to quit. This meant the company did things like imposing “excessive and intrusive control” on employees, assigning workers to demoralizing tasks, failing to provide training, isolating staff and using “intimidation maneuvers or threats and pay cuts.”
For instance, according to the Irish Times, employees who refused to quit would be uprooted and transferred to distant parts of the country (the BBC noted one woman was transferred three times in one year before killing herself), assigned to positions they weren't trained for, demoted from prestigious jobs to answering phones in call centers, or even deprived of chairs.
One suicide, a 50-year-old man, explicitly named working conditions at France Telecom as the reason he took his own life, his note citing “the permanent sense of urgency, overwork, absence of training, the total disorganization of the company” plus “management by terror.” Another, a 53-year-old father, did so while on the phone with two union delegates. One of the attempts was by a 37-year-old woman who tried to kill herself in front of her supervisors after being told she was to be transferred. Another 52-year-old prepared to leap from his window but made enough noise in the attempt that he was caught.
The company at the time said that these suicides were isolated incidents, and had nothing to do with working conditions at the company, with the president at the time dismissing them as a trend—for which he received massive condemnation from the public at large. Lombard himself remained defiant during the controversy, with his attorney saying there was no way he could have known the psychological states of all 100,000 employees. The prosecutors, for their part, do not directly blame the defendants for the suicides, but rather argue that the method of personnel management affected various employees with an increase of psychological-social risk.
The court agreed with the prosecutors, according to the New York Times, finding that the means to reach those 22,000 departures were illegitimate, and it blamed the leaders for putting in place what it called a conscious scheme to worsen work conditions of employees to induce them to quit, which created a climate of anxiety that ultimately led to multiple suicides.
The convicted executives intend to appeal the ruling.