If the major company needed to fire 20k people and was legally unable to do so due to grandfathered in formerly-government-employees then they should have raised this, brought it up with the government, made it a national conversation, be the squeaky wheel.

Not harass and screw with the employees to the point of suicide.

Sometimes a work-around to the problem is not better than an actual solution, no matter how painful the solution may be.

The "Via the window or the door" comment just shows how much they didn't give a damn about their employees as actual human beings.

The normal thing to do is split the company into multiple divisions, then separate those with little future and let them go bust. But leading a smaller company would have diminished the stature of the FT management, and they thought they could get away with it in the era of Sarkozy.

> If the major company needed to fire 20k people and was legally unable to do so due to grandfathered in formerly-government-employees then they should have raised this, brought it up with the government, made it a national conversation, be the squeaky wheel.

Because the press and people in France are know to be very sympathetic to tear-jerk stories from major Telecom companies?

The disregard for human beings isn't ok, but the alternative here is the company going bankrupt, firing all 130k employees, and prompting the sale of French Telecom infrastructure to foreign corporations at a discount via liquidation. I'm for that compared to harassment to suicide, but let's not pretend there's a happy alternative where everybody gets together and saves the company.

You seem to be thinking in only the extremes "Drive people to suicide or go bankcrupt" and "Save the company, rainbows and unicorns".

Get laws changed to allow for the firing and since it would be done publicly you can make sure the populace would pressure the government to give aid to those fired.

According to other posts it is apparently not as hard to fire state employees as is made out in the article but it costs extra money, so company paids the one-time redundency costs, shit happens, company eats the cost (and maybe the gov loans / bails them out to cover this one time cost)

There is an entire range of possible options, presenting it as a black and white "Necessary evil to prevent $ABSOLUTE_WORST_CASE_SCENARIO" is justifying the worst behaviour.

Can you proof that they would have gone under without "letting go" of 20k people? The usual reason is "we need to look better to the stock market" and that's simply not a valid reason. The reality is that there's a big margin between "we are growing 20% per year!" and "we all go bust!" that most companies exist in. Sure, you won't be Wall Streets darling, if all you do is make a small profit every year, but if that's your main goal that's your problem, not something your employees should have to pay for.

The real solution is what companies did until early 90s: you cut your company in multiple parts and let those unprofitable bust (and try to sell them before they do). Market consolidation is the worst if you're a pro-market guy.

Probably my bias working at small shops where hiring difficult and firing people is often ugly. Got to ask. Why try to fire 20,000 workers instead of find something profitable for them to do?

Because it’s easier to posit than to achieve it. If someone knew how to do that, they would already be doing it.

But it's not about firing.

> But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

> So the executives resolved to make life so unbearable that the workers would leave, prosecutors say.

Should they have been able to fire them? I don't know. But this is something different.

fake dilemma. you can fire state employees in France but it is much harder and you have to have good reasons.

most large businesses don't have good reasons to fire a huge chunk of their workforce, except for delivering more money to rich shareholders.

Apparently their jobs had become obsolete. Why exactly should their employment continue? Framing it as "delivering more money to shareholders" is so misguided.

Their salaries would be paid by the public anyway, factored into the price of the company's product.

Isn't it also humiliating to be paid for useless work? I think it can be better for the "victim" to be fired, too, so that they can find a more useful occupation.

How do people actually feel avout paying people for doing useless work? I personally find it quite enraging at times.

Where in the article is the "taking it up with the government" part? Shouldn't government take part of the blame?

Companies often hire new employees instead of retraining existing ones.

Yes. You can fire a state employee in France but the departure bonus is big and it cost money.

Consequently it is much better for shareholders to push them to leave by making their life miserable, and it's exactly what they did....

Delivering money to shareholders is a good reason. That’s the entire reason these enterprises exist. Everyone hired knows that’s the deal when you applied to work at a company. If you dont agree with that, don’t take the job.

The people being harrassed had been hired by a public service, not a company succumbing to the cult of "shareholder value" as the sole metric of a company's worth.

I didn't say I agreed with the harassment. I said that firing someone to improve return on investment is a perfectly acceptable reason to fire someone.

You said that they signed up to a shareholder value driven organisations, so should accept layoffs as part of such a company, but they didn't join a private company, they joined a public service that was later privatised.

Public vs private shouldn't matter here. Public institutions exist to provide services to taxpayers. Taxpayer money should be put to the highest and best use. If the job of some government employee is no longer the highest and best use of that taxpayer money, they should be let go. Taxpayers have no obligation to pay people indefinitely for labor that they no longer need or value.

taxpayers ~= shareholders

Harassment is never justified, no matter the reason.

> Firing employees needs to be done: how can you build a business without this ability?

Laying off people to balance the books is a novel concept, introduced in the 80s. What leads you to think you can't build a business without it?

It's a utilitarian dilemma (almost too perfectly).

Fire X (X = less than all) employees or do nothing and all employees will lose their job. Assuming some portion of employees will commit suicide from the job loss, this is the best outcome.

> Assuming some portion of employees will commit suicide from the job loss

It is not.

The problem here is that no firing has been done. They harassed they own employees close to suicide to make them leave instead of paying them to leave.... That's the problem and that's why they are in court.