Former executives at France Télécom could face prison over organised workplace harassment that led to a spate of staff suicides a decade ago, as a two-month trial that shocked France draws to a close this week, reports The Guardian.
French state prosecutors have urged judges to find the executives guilty of moral harassment and hand down the maximum prison sentence of one year, plus large fines, after details emerged in court of the turmoil felt by workers over systematic bullying tactics aimed at pushing staff to leave.
The case against the former state-owned French telecoms firm – known since 2013 as Orange – could set a world precedent with company managers held personally criminally responsible for strategic harassment aimed at forcing workers to resign.
Between 2008 and 2009, 35 employees took their own lives. The company had been privatised and was undertaking a restructuring plan during which bosses set out to cut more than a fifth of the workforce – more than 22,000 jobs.
Many of the workers who killed themselves left notes saying the company had made their lives unbearable.
Seven former France Télécom bosses, including the former CEO Didier Lombard and the former head of human resources Olivier Barberot, are accused of putting in place a toxic management system of institutional harassment designed to force workers out. Some staff were routinely forced to change job or relocate for work, finding their positions had been scrapped.
The accused deny the charges.
The court heard accounts from the families of several workers who had taken their own lives. Noémie Louvradoux told how her father, Rémy Louvradoux, a 57-year-old public sector worker at France Télécom, killed himself days before her 18th birthday.
“We loved my father. You killed him. And all for what?” she said in court, addressing the former executives. “France Télécom had destroyed his life and left him no way out.”
Louvradoux’s case was said by lawyers to sum up the toxic working environment. He had worked his way up in the company from a low position to a more senior local role, but in 2006 his job was scrapped and he was made to relocate and change jobs four times in three years, while trying to work as hard as possible to avoid more change. He had written to company bosses in 2009 complaining of an endemic problem and saying: “Nothing is being done to face it up to it: suicide remains the only solution.”