“A wave has started, now no one knows how to stop it,” Patrice Diochet of the CFTC union said. “Unfortunately there will be other suicides, we’re seeing a snowball effect. The directors have to completely change their management style and put back some humanity into the company. Every suicide is complex, but it’s clear that recently work is what has been pushing people over the edge.”
Anne, not her real name, is a close colleague of one of the latest workers to kill himself: a skilled technician at the Lannion center in Brittany for Orange research and development. “The malaise is everywhere, from client-liaison staff who aren’t allowed enough rigidly scheduled minutes to talk properly to customers, to technicians who aren’t allowed the time to do thorough repairs. Only money and marketing counts, not the quality of our work. I’ve been moved three times. You could get a call on Friday at 11am saying you had to find somewhere else to go in the company by Monday morning. Other highly skilled technicians ended up in call-centers, chasing unpaid bills. Even so, I’ve been on anti-depressants, my marriage broke up, I can’t sleep at night.”
France is particularly sensitive to workplace suicides after patterns of staff taking their lives at Renault, Peugeot and the electricity giant EDF in recent years. Some argue that the remaining public sector workers at the company are having difficulty adapting to the cut-throat ways of a privatized enterprise. But Gaelle Urvoas, a CGT Brittany union representative, said: “It’s not change, it’s the way it’s being handled.”
Outside France, Orange’s management techniques have raised eyebrows among its subsidiaries. A middle-manager at a Dublin subsection of Orange described the alleged use of “terror” tactics by French managers.
“When a French director visited us, her associate said: ‘This is going to be a longer meeting than in France because you people here aren’t as afraid of the CEO as you should be.’”
A sociologist, Monique Crinon, said “management by stress” was not uniquely French, but part of a new trend across Europe. After interviewing a cross-section of France Telecom and Orange staff, she identified feelings of being undervalued and “low self-esteem” running from directory inquiries, call-center staff and sales assistants in mobile phone shops, right up to senior managers. Teams were deliberately broken up to leave workers isolated and feeling like failures in a performance-driven system.
“I found normal people whose psyches had been weakened by work,” she said.
One senior worker in her 50s who was demoted to work in a call-center said she felt like she had stepped “back in time” to an era where mainly young women staff were terrorized and controlled, made to make several sales an hour from dictated scripts.
“There was a lot of illness, a lot of depression, I had to leave,” she said.
Andre Rumeau, a CGT trade unionist in his 50s, worked with Michel at Orange in Marseille.
“It’s shocking that a respected colleague who was so good at his job was the one who cracked,” he said. “If these tragedies are to stop, things have to change at the top.”
A spokesman for France Telecom said of the allegations by staff: “Many other workers have had a very good experience of the company changes over recent years. We do not deny that there have been problems in certain places. But what is certain is that these complaints do not reflect a complete picture of the company. France Telecom has taken on board the staff concerns and launched a series of measures to deal with them.”
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