> If a factory closes and employees are laid off, does the business then become responsible if people kill themselves over it? No.
A common (mis)management technique used in France is called "placardisation" (literally "put someone in the closet"). Rather than laying off people, drive them to nervous breakdown and ensure that they quit. I've survived this once and I can tell you that it's not pretty. That's the kind of practice that was being tried.
(I've written something a bit more detailed in another comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21856307 )
> Instead - we got a kangaroo court.
The investigation lasted years. What makes you claim that it's a kangaroo court?
It's better for everyone if you can just shitcan people when things aren't working out.
Does this reach the point where the practice has a "cute" name over there, too?
This is a lie. The top bracket is at 45% above €156.244. This means it is mathematically impossible to pay more than 45% in income taxes, let alone more than 50%.
> systematically high levels of inequality
Yes, there is, but France has a lower Gini index than Canada, so hearing that criticism coming from expats to that country is a bit hypocritical.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Your rebuttals don't help: a 45% max tax (instead of 50%) + ~25% payroll tax + 20% VAT is really quite a hostile.
The difference in GINI between Canada and France is really quite small, unfortunately, there's nothing to be proud of when 'everyone is at the same level of poverty'.
The culture is boring in Canada, but almost 'everything works' well - civil government, low levels of corruption etc..
My brother is essentially 'working class' and he and his wife live a nice, big new home (that they can afford), they have every material pleasure one could imagine, an impossible achievement in most of France.
I still love France but it's not a fully functional state.
How so? It seems to have been an orderly trial.
> First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.
One could argue with this characterization that Lombard himself made all the time. But at any rate, they weren't prosecuted for the suicides, only for institutional harassment.
> An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.
This is indeed what Orange did in every other country but France. You can look up what happened in Poland to TPSA for example, and it took place everywhere else.
Orange was not able to do layoffs in France because of statutory employment guarantees provided to much of the civil servant workforce.
One can certainly disagree with such a policy — it is nuts to guarantee jobs for life in an industry where the jobs 10 years from now are completely different from the jobs to do now — but it is another thing to use a disagreement with this policy in order to justify rolling out harassment techniques as a way to downsize. It's like faulting the employees for taking a good deal decades ago — the government didn't have to offer the deal back then.
There have to be limits to management's ability to instill a climate of fear, as the consequences are real (not talking specifically about the suicides here, as the policy had many other negative outcomes).
I like the way you phrase it.
Because you can't blame employers for the personal actions of employees.
It's political because there was a narrative created in France that 'Orange is an evil place that drove this to happen' and people wanted to see supposed 'accountability'.
The trial is red meat to appease the plebes.
The unemployment rate in France is 8.5%, whereas in the US and Canada, it's less than 1/2 that, in Germany it's 3.1% (!).
The laws there to supposedly protect French workers form layoffs are clearly not working and are probably having the opposite effect.
> Because you can't blame employers for the personal actions of employees.
I'm unsure what you're referring to, but that's untrue, thankfully. If managers direct their employees to perform illegal actions, they too can be held liable. Nothing so brazen here, but willfully turning a blind eye to, or rewarding middle managers applying severely distressing psychological pressure (meaningless assignments, etc) is something that they chose to do way past the warning signs. I also don't think the sanction is disproportionate, nobody goes to jail, and the fine is modest. But I wouldn't put the square quotes around accountability.
There were 35 suicides in ~ 32,000 workers, not 100,000.
This is populist lynching.
First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.
It's a huge misrepresentation to talk about a 'rash of suicides' that's just about the statistical norm.
Second - having lived and worked in France, I can assure you that workplaces are generally not toxic nearly to the degree that you see in the USA. The hours are short, and vacations are long.
In France employees literally kidnap managers by blockading them in their offices with furniture during union negotiations.
Third - is the degree to which negative work conditions actually affect life outcomes. So it's clear there were several policies in place that were not very nice - but this happens all the time in the world. An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.
If a factory closes and employees are laid off, does the business then become responsible if people kill themselves over it? No.
What needs to happen here is an investigation into what actually happened, to try to fix the issues in a reasonable way.
Instead - we got a kangaroo court.
French workers and management have been in a really tense standoff now for a couple of decades (well, leftover from a few hundred years ago) and it's not going well.
I literally live in an are of Montreal where tons of young, educated people are moving because the French system in their words is 'breaking down'. Few people believe in the work, it's very risky to hire people because they can't be let go, taxes are insanely high (>50% income tax after a 24% employment tax), systematically high levels of inequality and a serious problem with integration of new migrants that has little parallel in North America.
This was a political answer to a problem that needs real solutions.