If it’s within a small margin, I’d conclude that’s a pretty solid display that people are people and some decide to kill themselves.
The incredibly insensitive delivery of this argument cost the man his job years ago. The immense grief of families and coworkers, the fact that the suicides appeared to be work-related (and sometimes even happening at the workplace), the scathing reports by medical inspectors seemed all irrelevant to the dude, who basically just looked at this as a statistic to be managed. His lack of public displays of empathy or desire for introspection was pretty disturbing.
Obviously there is other causes also. But the base principel is a very shaky foundation to build a legal framework on.
We should use our intuition to ask questions rather than to answer them.
You're literally saying "This job is a necessary part of our society, and while you personally might not want to tolerate the {harassment/low pay/terrible conditions}, someone else has to."
Those jobs were civil servants with lifetime job guarantee in what was, at the time of hiring, a public company.
Of course the whole question is how to transition to private company with private employment, but that doesn’t cancel the fact that civil servants had made serious concessions to get a lifetime job (lower grade than what they could get in the private sector after their diploma, in exchange for lifetime security), which artificially put them in a weak negotiation position (few savings, mental dedication to only one speciality).
That's a pretty poor excuse for misbehavior. Similar to "if you don't like this country, you should leave".
Literally right after the bit you quoted.
Leaving a job is sometimes a big deal, but it’s never as serious. One could argue that the more serious it is for your the greater the problem in question is because you don’t have any skills deemed valuable by your current employer or potential employers.
What to do with useless white collar labor is a hard problem. Mistreating people is a bad idea, but you need to do “something” otherwise you’ll eventually just go out of business if firing them is not an option.
Globalism is hard.
Suicide has been chosen as its subject, among the various subjects that we have had occasion to study in our teaching career, because few are more accurately to be defined.... Suicide as it exists today is precisely one of the forms through which the collective affection from which we suffer is transmitted; thus it will aid us to understand this.... [I]n common terms, suicide is pre-eminently the desperate act of one who does not care to live.
Moreover, of population suicide rates:
Not only is this rate constant for long periods, but its invariability is even greater than that of leading demographic data.
That is, deviations from norm are intrinsically significant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book)
https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci...
The problem with a suicide cluster isn't in determining the cause. It's the fact itself.
The broader concept is itself well-addressed in Durkheim's book in terms of regional and cultural variances in base rates.
The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?