France Telecom trial: "We must accept less profitable and more humane companies"

Suspended to the verdict of the judges, the epilogue of this decennial affair is set for December 20. Ten years ago, the suicide of many employees of France Telecom had moved the Hexagon, raising a recurring problem, inherent in the organization of the group. The one that one of them had described, in his letter of goodbye, "management by terror".

Thursday, July 11, the trial of France Telecom and its former leaders closed after 46 days of hearing during which magistrates have tried to understand why several employees of the former state monopoly have committed suicide , directly accusing their employers.

On the last day of this unprecedented trial, which sees for the first time a company of the CAC 40 judged for such facts, the prosecutor's office requested the maximum penalties provided by the law for "moral harassment", or 75 000 euros fine against France Telecom, and one year in prison and 15 000 euros fine against its former leaders, accused of having conducted a "corporate policy of destabilization of employees", while they wanted to remove thousands of jobs. A qualification of "institutional harassment" which, according to Sylvaine Perragin, psychotherapist specializing in occupational psychology and business consultant, "formalizes the fact that it is not individual acts, but management systems that are at the origin of these sufferings ".

"We treated them like pawns"

Symbol of the problem of suffering at work, the France Telecom case - which became Orange in 2013 - was the subject of an investigation lasting more than seven years, after which the investigating judges retained the cases of 39 employees, 19 of whom committed suicide between 2007 and 2010, 12 tried to do so and eight went through an episode of depression or a work stoppage. Altogether, in this trial, which was described by the president of the court as "a work of common and collective justice", 167 people joined the case.

Faced with them, Didier Lombard, CEO from 2005 to 2010, Louis-Pierre Wenès, ex-number 2, and Olivier Barberot, former HRD, rejected any responsibility, challenging any moral harassment, defined in the penal code as "acts the purpose or effect of which is a deterioration of working conditions ".

To understand the spiral of suffering experienced by these employees who saw in death the only way to escape the critical situation of their professional life, we must go back to 2006. In the midst of technological revolution and in the face of heightened competition, a plan "NExT", with its "Act" component, is set up within the group to "improve [its] efficiency, [its] efficiency and [its] productivity".

At that time, the company was "in jeopardy", often reminded Didier Lombard during the trial. It was then necessary to act quickly, and to strike hard. Put in place by the management, the plan provided for the elimination of 22,000 jobs and a change of occupation for 10,000 employees, so that they leave themselves. Departures that Didier Lombard said, at the time, want to do "by the window or the door", according to the testimony of several executives. The telecommunications company had already become private, but since the majority of the employees were still civil servants, they could not be dismissed.

Taken in the gear of this plan, thousands of employees leave the company, others fall into the depression. In 2009, a 51-year-old employee killed himself at his home in Marseille, implicating his employer in a letter. "I'm committing suicide because of my work at France Telecom, it's the only cause," he writes. A few weeks later, an employee stabs himself in full meeting, a few days before the suicide of a Parisian employee, defensed.

"In a management logic, we played the game of musical chairs, we treated them as pawns," said Sylvaine Perragin. "Telephony technicians, sometimes engineers, were moved to call trays, changed their job and their professional identity regardless of what it meant to them." The only goal was to [transfer] 22,000 people and forced mobility, that's what brought the real suffering. "

Toxic organization

A suffering linked above all to a "business problem", according to the specialist. However, after two and a half months of hearings and after the final pleadings Thursday, the Secretary General of Orange, Nicolas Guérin - representing the legal person France Telecom - was the last to speak at the bar. "We recognize that the transformations of France Telecom have generated cases of individual suffering that the company has, unfortunately, not always known prevent," he said, contesting, like other defendants, the idea of organized and widespread harassment, and a corporate policy to destabilize employees.

"These are not cases of individual depressions, but cases caused by the organization," responds Sylvaine Perragin, who explains that after the study of individual tracks, the psychodynamics of work [discipline studying the complexity of reports that maintains the man at work] understood that the malaise of these employees was not related to an individual problem, but to the fact that they evolved in a "toxic organization". "It's not because people were fragile that they were depressed, on the contrary, the stronger people are, the longer they endure and the more they are unhappy and end up drunk."

The financial result, absolute priority

According to a report sent to justice in 2010 by the labor inspectorate, the managerial methods, by their "brutality", "had the effect of undermining [the] physical and mental health [of employees]". A brutality accentuated by "repeated acts" according to the public prosecutor's office, which evoked a company policy that had the effect of "destabilizing" employees and "creating an anxiety-provoking business climate".

For Sylvaine Perragin, this mechanism is linked to the structural evolution of companies, especially large groups which, locking themselves into "quantified logic", base their analysis and organization of work on achieving objectives and results. . It then opposes the "management logic", where the financial result is an absolute priority with regard to globalization and the hyper-competition of companies, to "business logic". "When you are in business logic, what existed before, you are in the logic of taking into account the constraints of employees.This does not mean that it makes you good financial managers, but it makes you good managers of humans, "she says, stressing the gap between employees and business leaders" very far from the field ".

For the psychotherapist, who has been working for twenty years on issues related to suffering at work, things must change structurally. Through its studies and its work, this one finds that, although more frequent within large groups, this organization "toxic" generalizes to all the types of companies because of the standardization of the tasks and the management by the stress. "There are about 400 suicides, officially linked to work, every year.The doctors identify 4000 infarcts directly related to stress at work.The burn-out is in the tens of thousands ... It is imperative to stop this deadly business management . "

Emblematic because of its size, the France Telecom trial aims to be set up as an example by the Paris public prosecutor's office. But what lessons can be learned? In his opinion, Sylvaine Perragin is not sure that this trial really contributes to revolutionize the world of work. "The problem is systemic and political," she says. "You have to agree to have less profitable and more humane businesses, and as long as business leaders and large groups do not agree to change the operating system, the same causes will produce the same effects."