Item — HN Reader

Why?

> Lombard wanted to cut 20% of staff — about 22,000 employees — to reduce debt and make the company more competitive. But many workers retained the protections they had enjoyed as civil servants.

What?

> Between 2008 and 2009, there were 19 suicides of employees, who left notes blaming the company or who killed themselves at work. Twelve others attempted suicide during that period.

How?

> Engineers were demoted to call center jobs. Employees say they were micromanaged, isolated and assigned jobs without training. Families were moved across the country multiple times in short periods of time.

What happens if they are found guilty?

> The defendants face up to a year in prison and fines of 15,000 euros (about $16,750).

3 comments

Something similar happened in Poland, after France Telecom bought Telekomunikacja Polska (Polish national telecom). The conditions of the aquisition precluded FT from firing a lot of the staff, so they moved a lot of the better-paid people into call center hell, managed by nazi-like assholes. As per account of my family member that was one of those people, most of them quickly got perscription drugs from a psychiatrist (tranquilizers etc.), to avoid nervous breakdowns. After a couple of years, 100% of them left, often for an „early retirement” scheme which paid 20-25% of their salary.

Oh, and that was when the FT was still „the good guys”, i.e. a public service. I guess they just treated Polish branch as their for-profit colony, where rules of basic decency do not apply.

It's unbelivable how no one ended up in jail for this whole Telekomunikacja Polska and Orange privatization enterprise. Then the sudden and mysterious death of the Polish oligarch responsible for the transaction. Story for a movie, because any legit investigation is probably impossible.

Given the educational level and mission dedication of the telecom staffers it seems like the company missed opportunities in both cases to focus the capability of their employees towards something innovative.

Did you understand from the article why the workers felt trapped in these jobs? Was the economy or sector extremely bad at the time?

It sounds like it was a combination of them still being civil servants (meaning they weren't eligible for severance pay) and management was doing everything they could to push them out while they were privatizing the company. Extremely bad doesn't begin to describe 2008-9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession)... there were no jobs being hired for in most sectors, in most countries during that time.

Ah I thought the mention of public sector meant they had more protections and benefits rather than less.

The “more protections” was they couldn’t be fired.

Therefore they need less protection/benefits for the case that they were fired, that being impossible.

Seems like a gaping hole in worker protections of public sector employees were exempted from severance pay. What’s the reasoning? Is it really because they just cannot lose their jobs?

Yes, public servants are guaranteed a job for life, so they get neither severance pay nor unemployment if they “chose” to resign.

Nowadays they can ask for a 3-year pause (e.g. to create a startup, etc.) but those plans come from the “flexible economy” and were introduced only recently.

I am sure 51-year-old technicians, to take one example from the article, would be well aware of the considerable ageism they'd face in the job market.

A permanent grant of free money from the government is not a solution to ageism.

A decision to void an existing contract isn't either.

I have no sympathy with spurious contracts that involve parties that can't sign or display consent.

Which side can't display consent, the employer or the employee?

The taxpayer that foots the bill.

That is a complete non-sequitur.

It was a public service company, France Telecom, and employees were looking at their job as being civil servants in a way. Management decided to force many changes on employees in the hope they would resign. Many committed suicide or got sick, depressed etc...

They didn’t look at it as being civil servants, they were civil servants. The last civil service entrance exam in FT was in 1995. The vast majority of employees hired before 1995 were in fact civil servants. When FT was privatized, part of the deal was that the new company would keep the existing civil servant workforce. (Source : worked at FT/Orange from 2004 to 2017)

Yes the article says all that. It doesn’t say what is was that trapped them in these jobs though. How did it get so bad? Why did people kill themselves rather than resign?

You would never resign. Those jobs are for life and have benefits and pensions.

It's like a startup who offers high stock options vested over a period for early employees. They grow too quickly and try to push the early employees out without triggering a clause that allows them to take back the options if they quit. They try to place them in jobs they are over qualified or not suited for.

Would you quit and leave money on the table.

It is actually extremely difficult to resign when you are haressed even when you know you are being harassed. It hit your sense of worth really hard. Feeling worthless prevents you for properly assessing what you could do on the job market. It also doesn't stop at work and generally strongly impacts your personal life for the same reason.

I have very little context besides being french and knowing people who worked there. Being "fonctionaire" is usually a very stable job where you will never get fired. If you go this route you will usually stay forever in the same position.

It's France, there isn't the culture of switching jobs all the time.

As consequence very few people hire for these positions as well.

A large majority of these employees were above 50 and had worked most of their life on the telephone infrastructure (network, last-mile, etc.). In 2004 France’s telephone network was fully mature, there simply wasn’t any more work for them to do. Sure, they could reskill and try their luck with a competing telco (which would have far less infrastructure, as they all piggy-backed on the incumbent). But would a competing telco hire a 50-something ex-civil servant, or someone out of school with more up-to-date skills and no idea of what a union is?

the article says that civil service employees don't receive the same unemployment benefits that private sector employees receive

Employees in the private sector can receive significant severance pay, which provides a financial cushion while they look for a new job. Civil service contracts don't have that perk, so France Télécom employees were reluctant to quit.

I wonder if it was more of a cultural issue. The article states that civil servants were difficult to fire, implying you could expect to have a job for life. Conversely, private sector jobs had some severance pay which could bridge the gap between getting a new job. It's not clear if the ex-civil servants had this to fall back on in this case.

A radical negative change in the working environment combined with no safety net seems like a recipe for depression. Maybe these people were ill prepared for the upheaval and had no idea how to cope with it.

The French economy is always bad. In 2007-2009, unemployment was at record lows, but still 7-8.5%. The French model is that the government keeps your employer from firing you. Great for people who have a job, not so great for people who are looking for a job.

How do French companies remain competitive globally if there are no incentives for the employed labor force to increase productivity?

France is in fact losing ground globally. Compare PPP-adjusted GDP per capita for the US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita-pp... to France: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/gdp-per-capita-ppp.

From 1990 to 2017, U.S. GDP per capita is up from $36,500 to $54,200, about 50%. France is up from $29,500 to $38,600, about 30%. The forecast for 2021 has France at $41,100 and the U.S. at $60,100: https://tradingeconomics.com/forecast/gdp-per-capita-ppp?con.... That means in 30 years, Americans will have gone from being modestly richer than the French (24%) to being quite a bit richer than the French (50%). To put that into perspective, the 50% gap from France to the U.S. is the same as the gap from Turkey to France.

Perhaps there are other incentives besides the threat of the destruction of livelihood that might work?

Sounds like people can get locked in their own golden cage

Worker protections make sense, but it seems that too many and you're locking people into an illusion.

The civil service had grandfathered rights - that's not uncommon even today BT a former civil service department (well two actually) still has hold overs from that time - the extra privilege days annual leave for example.