The France Telecom suicide scandal (which probably isn't)

Let's begin by putting things in perspective. Even today, in what for many French workers remains the scary new world of privatisation and competition, the country's incumbent operator, France Telecom, still employs upwards of 102,000 people.

Over the past year and a half, 23 FT workers have committed suicide. Every one was an individual and familial tragedy but given the sheer size of the workforce the number of deaths falls well within the bell-curve of the "normal" distribution of suicide statistics.

Nonetheless, FT's trades unions insist that the number of suicides at the carrier is a direct result of what they describe as the "mass re-organisation" of the company that has seen 10,000 workers (that's just under 10 per cent of the total employees) compulsorily transferred to other jobs in other departments over the past three years.

It is worth noting that these 10,000 staff were not made redundant and thrown out of work. they were kept on in France Telecom in other posts. Nonetheless, Didier Lombard, FT's CEO, has now been summoned to meet the Labour Minister, Xavier Darcos, to explain why more than a score of employees have chosen to take their own lives over the past 18 months.

Not only that, but in a direct intervention in the running of what is ostensibly now a "private" company, the Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, has instructed FT to call an extraordinary meeting of its board of directors "to discuss the suicides."

The Finance Minister says France Telecom needs to send a "very strong message to the personnel" that it is acting to stem the flow of those that are killing themselves. Perhaps the government has some idea how this desirable outcome might be effected, but if it does, it is not letting FT into the secret.

FT's main trades unions, the Force Ouvriere and the Confederatiion Francaise Democratique du Travail (CFTC) have issued a joint statement saying "The spotlight must fall on on the causes of these tragedies and of the growing malaise within the company."

And François Chérèque, the secretary-general of the CDFT, says, "This is a company which has a single goal of making money and inevitably, the employees at France Telecom, who were used to another work relationship with customers, are asked to turn a profit."

What M. Chérèque conveniently chooses to forget is that the earlier "work relationship" was more often than not a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare for FT's subscribers as they battled the vagaries of a Byzantime administration that based its dealings with customers on corporate philosophy of "like it or lump it".

In the past FT was a carrier run very much for the benefit of its employees with the subscriber always coming a poor second to the perceived needs of the organisation.