The roots of the case date back about two decades, to a period when the company, then known by the name France Télécom, was still part of the government's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Once a state-run monopoly, the company sold off most of its shares and underwent a process of privatization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

That process left its employees in an uncomfortable situation: still enjoying the strong employment protections of civil servants, but working for a management structure newly constrained by the marketplace and looking to shed costs to compete.

I imagine this to be a huge clash of cultures and those workers caught caught in the middle and didn’t have the skills to adapt. That doesn’t exonerate the company but I can’t think of two more diametrically opposed attitudes about work.

Even if a defense lawyer knows that their client is guilty and believes that they should be given a harsh sentence, that must not stop them from trying to get their client off with the lowest possible conviction or sentence. The — VagabondSpectre

I don't think the average lawyer is valiantly upholding the Greek ideal, though. It's about money, which translates to security and power.

The OP was mainly asking how we could hold person A responsible for person B's suicide. It quickly rolled down the path of practicality and taxes.

Intellectually, I dont think we can hold a boss responsible for an employee suicide. If we do, that's all emotion. That says something about the nature of morality.

Make up your mind, Frank: either you want to live in a compassionate society, and one where people are NOT seen as standardized production units that are interchangeable and removable without consequence, OR you can accept a society where employees are superfluous (we are not quite there yet), disposable, and a COST rather than an ASSET -- which is current practice. — Bitter Crank

It's like being a character in a novel and reading the book at the same time. The character is all caught up in a grand drama, the reader knows none of it really matters.

I once heard that when workers unionize, they just get two asshole bosses instead of one since unionizers tend to be belligerent buttheads.
— frank

Did this pearl of wisdom fall out of your head when you last blew your nose? — Bitter Crank

No, it was some old guy. :)

We weren't talking about whether or not it's right. We were talking about whether it costs the taxpayers money. But since you brought it up, why would you say that being an ******* is wrong? — frank

It's kind of in the definition.

By the bye, if you're talking about who is culpable, then you are talking about whether it is right or wrong.

It's a choice. As a society we choose what we will put up with. Why should potential "efficiency gains" outweigh every other consideration? You could get efficiency gains by forcing kids to work, extending the working week to 60 hours, abolishing retirement. That would toughen us all up too. The question is why would we want that? — Baden

This is a million dollar question. We are a loving, caring society, the globe is with its people. In some areas. Not all.

But it used to be not like this for about two-three thousand years.

And before that, before agriculture and civilization, it used to be like that for a very long time.

So what makes or breaks goodness is on one hand economy, on the other hand survival advantage, and on the third, public wish-public opinion-public attitude-public zeitgeist.

Message to some of the correspondents: Why are we trying to convince Frank of something that he won't be convinced of, based on his principles? It's cruel. Let him be.

A person's principles are bigger than himself, and definitely bigger than the opinions of anyone else.

People go to death because of their principles. A few philosophical arguments are child's play compared to death. If I were you, I'd leave it at that.

Maybe this will help you rustle people's jimmies.

(1) Countries' legal systems should be able to punish those responsible for working conditions that provably and significantly impede health.

(2) Working conditions that provably and significantly contribute to death and sickness impede health. (1, consequence)

(3) There are many independent reports of working conditions at Orange significantly contributing to deaths and sickness and they should be trusted and treated as evidence. (Premise)

(4a) It is reasonable to believe that working conditions at Orange contributed significantly to deaths and sickness. (3, using the evidence).

(4b) It is unreasonable to believe that working conditions at Orange did not contribute significantly to deaths and sickness (3, using the evidence).

(5) France's legal system should be able to punish those responsible at Orange for the working conditions at their company as they provably and significantly impeded health. — fdrake

I essentially agree with this.

Please don't revolve around the thread talking in front of my back.

Open the doors of the windows and let the climate in. And please don't put the logo so visually on the pod cover.

Thank you.

YES!

Oh Brother, you have seen the light!

Merry Christmas! :halo: :up: :sparkle:

I imagine this to be a huge clash of cultures and those workers caught caught in the middle and didn’t have the skills to adapt. That doesn’t exonerate the company but I can’t think of two more diametrically opposed attitudes about work. — Brett

It isn't about the skills of the employess or adaption to new organizations and work.

It's more about a serious cultural issue.

Some French person working for the state of FRANCE, be it in the military, or be it in various ministries or be it in the post office (I assume they were then civil servants) is really, REALLY, different than to work at McDonalds. Sorry, but the nation state hasn't been yet killed and buried.

That's the huge problem here.

You have to understand that someone employed as a civil servant or someone working for your country is genuinely different from the ordinary business transaction that one makes when working for a private firm.

I imagine this to be a huge clash of cultures and those workers caught caught in the middle and didn’t have the skills to adapt. — Brett

This was not about having the skills to adapt or not. Orange deliberately placed staff in roles they were not suited or trained for, assigned tasks and timeframes that were unachievable, didn't offer the needed training, under-assigned personel for projects and so on. This was a deliberate ploy to ensure that staff would fail and feel so incredibly miserable that they would quit. Not a 'clash of cultures'. A malicious, designed attempt at cost-cutting though immerseration.

Merry Christmas!

In the case of depression and anxiety disorders the cause is likely to be genetic. You can't have a genetic predisposition to having your head ripped off in a combine accident, so agricultural accidents can be easily traced to a lack of safety precautions. Psychological disorders can't be. — frank

Equivocating between a cause and a predisposition doesn't help much. Let's grant that mental illnesses do not occur without genetic predisposition, genetic predisposition alone doesn't lead to the development of any mental illness - it also needs a facilitating environment for them to develop. The environment at Orange has been established as sufficiently terrible to cause mental illness; whether it caused it in only those with a genetic predisposition doesn't matter, it provably contributed to lots of death and even more sickness.

Moreover, why would a disease having a genetic predisposition absolve a company of their responsibility to their workers? They had contracts, Orange hated the contract, they abused their workers to make them fuck off.

The role genetic predisposition plays in your argument is to centre the legal (and moral) responsibility for Orange's harassment of workers onto the workers. For that, you need a better account of genetic predisposition and how it relates to workplace environments to be convincing.

"It isn't his fault he's drawing false analogies, he's genetically predisposed to!"

Source? — frank

Here ya go.

Has France started legally mandating good management practices? — frank

No, more people would go to the gulags if this happened. What happened was the work environment at Orange was judged as being sufficiently terrible to count as severe harassment, they had a responsibility for their workers' welfare, and these two things together make an enforceable claim that they contributed (bore responsibility) to workers' deaths.

I just pointed out that an abusive environment can produce efficiency gains. It's called bootcamp. It's you who wants to make the positive claim that abusive workplaces create costs for society in general. I'm not seeing it. As BC pointed out, every job has a downside. You get paid to put up with it. — frank

Why would an office environment be anything like a military boot camp in terms of what counts as a needless hazard?

The world is full of assholes. Sooner or later we all have to learn how to deal with that. An asshole boss is an opportunity to either learn how to deal with abuse or grow a spine stiff enough to get yourself out of the situation — frank

That goes for asshole bosses on the wrong end of a judge and jury. Or one in a world where certain kinds of behavior caused by being an asshole lead to certain kinds of societal punishment and censure.
They can grow a hard or get a spine hard enough for prison or be clever enough not to breaks social contracts. They can learn also.

ASsholes are not the weather that the rest of humanity must learn to deal with. They also have to learn to deal. And now a certain kind of French Employer asshole has some new information to learn from or not.

Orange was judged as being sufficiently terrible to count as severe harassment, they had a responsibility for their workers' welfare, and these two things together make an enforceable claim that they contributed (bore responsibility) to workers' deaths. — fdrake

I agree. Furthermore, to preempt any arguments why the bosses should not be responsible and expected to not be horribly abusive: this belongs in the area of tort law, which deals with the required care of each individual for their fellow humans. Under the auspices of the consideration of tort law issues, if you see a man drowning in a lake, and you have a means to pull him to safety, you HAVE to do it; if you fail, you can be charged with neglect of a person in need.

This is the law, all over the civilized world. You can't really let a man die or get injured because you are neglectful or intentionally not helping when you could.

There are a lot of these cases coming out of police arrests and custody, as well as from jails, where the inmates or people taken into custody are beaten to death not only by the jail keepers, but by their cell mates.The police and the jail keepers have the responsibility and they must act within its dictates, to save the fellow humans from unnecessary, accidental, deaths, or from other forms of avoidable harm.

There are other cases coming out of familial neglect; a dying family member dies because care needed is not provided by the family. The fact he or she, the dying person, is hateful, unbearably bad, abusive, etc. is not a condition for refusing to provide care.

And of course, there are the baby killers, who take their ill children to untrained healers, such as to charlatans, and the child dies.

And of course there is the clash between fundamentalist christian sects and the secular law, who, when certain illness strikes, could save their children, family, brethren, but don't due to religious considerations. These cases may for instance involve a life-saving blood transfusion which the religious think is evil and against the will of their god.

The case of the bosses driving workers to suicide can be argued to have contravened the tort law, which requires to give enough care to save people from harm or death.

Your concern for the workers is a tribute to either your kind heart or the fact that you direct most of your talent into sophistry. Maybe both.

Ssu provided information that makes the situation a little more understandable. The telecommunications company had been operated by the government. The government left the company in a non-competitive state. When the company became private, the executives struggled to keep the company afloat with their hands tied because the employees kept the protected status they had when the company was government owned.

I know exactly what happened at the company.

Yes, the new owners faced with a situation that was obviously going to be there from before their privitization purchase, chose to act immorally. They could not possibly have been surprised by the situation (employment contracts, for example) and of course their creativity and that of some analysts could only come up with one possible solution, which they must have had in advance as their choice to purchase. Coincidentally during the privitization trend the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer and the middle class smaller. All due to the privitization processes advocated and lobbied for and using control of media to make them seem 'obvious' and 'competitive'. So, they helped create a situation, could not possibly have been surprised by it and chose to immorally and in violation of contracts treat their workers in such a terrible fashion that they would leave.

Your concern for the workers is a tribute to either your kind heart or the fact that you direct most of your talent into sophistry. — frank

I had no idea that pointing out unsupported assumptions, equivocations and falsehoods was sophistry. Posting arguments in premise-entailment form as an initial response, that well known strategy of sophists.

It's better to work with nature and allow small adjustments (which might include 35 suicides), rather than prop up an artificial system that will eventually fail in a larger bloody adjustment. — frank

You attempt to portray Orange's provable mistreatment of workers as heroic, as necessary for adaptation for Orange's market success, as natural - as opposed to the 'artificial' contracts the targeted Orange employees had. All this does is portrays the management strategies, which were proved beyond reasonable doubt to lead to employee suicides, as beyond criticism by allying them with natural forces - despite being choices in management style (apparently nature flows from the management reorg). You claim that this is good in the aggregate despite there being very good evidence that such practices, even less extreme cases, cause huge productivity losses the world over and have demonstrably huge social costs. I substantiated both those claims and provided you with a source.

The fact that the job market was tight indicates that France is overpopulated and some portion of the workers need to move to where there are jobs — frank

"Orange's workplace management strategy of targeted harassment had to do with the fact that France was overpopulated and that the job market was tight, not to do with circumventing protections and compensation upon firing afforded to the workers at France Telecom from their previous contract"

These are just assertions with no argument.

It's a little harder see how to apply that in the case of psychological abuse because while asbestos has pretty much the same effect on everyone, moral harassment doesn't. Some people thrive on an emotionally charged environment that includes permission to be abusive (which is provided by an abusive executive.) — frank

"A work environment does not contribute to employee sickness if it does not result in that sickness for all employees" and "High pressure work environments are the same as intentionally abusive management strategies"

The first also contradicts:

In the case of depression and anxiety disorders the cause is likely to be genetic. You can't have a genetic predisposition to having your head ripped off in a combine accident, so agricultural accidents can be easily traced to a lack of safety precautions. Psychological disorders can't be. — frank

The idea that it's a genetic predisposition. That the worker suicides had anything to do with a genetic predisposition or genetic cause is also un-argued for. If you want to establish that the workers at Orange committed suicide predominantly because of their genetic predisposition, you need stronger evidence tying the workers at Orange who committed suicide's genetic profile to the environment, then you need to establish that the environment was not the main driving force regarding their development of the illness. As it stands, the management strategies were established as intentionally abusive.

You attempt to do this by simultaneously downplaying the demonstrated effects the workplace had on its workers and shifting the onus of responsibility to them for their harassment.

The world is full of assholes. Sooner or later we all have to learn how to deal with that. An asshole boss is an opportunity to either learn how to deal with abuse or grow a spine stiff enough to get yourself out of the situation. — frank

There's a big difference between an asshole boss with bad management (which, inevitably, leads to bad working conditions) and tailoring management practices to abuse people into quitting.

When the company became private, the executives struggled to keep the company afloat with their hands tied because the employees kept the protected status they had when the company was government owned. — frank

You continue to portray what happened as necessary or inevitable and leave it at that. Even if you grant that enforced redundancy was necessary for Orange to continue growing as a company, this does not establish that any particular way of enforced redundancy is good or bad. As it stands, their management practices were tailored to make people quit "out the door or out the window" (quote from Orange management), case reports were given in court of what the management did, it was established as abusive (not just "high pressure") and not necessary.

Your posts in this thread are full of unsubstantiated conjecture, rhetorical flourishes and reframing attempts, presented with conviction, you also "know" that what you're saying is true...

STRANGER: Then the Sophist has been shown to have a sort of conjectural or apparent knowledge only of all things, which is not the truth?

THEAETETUS: Exactly; no better description of him could be given.

Merry Christmas. :)

There's a big difference between an asshole boss with bad management (which, inevitably, leads to bad working conditions) and tailoring management practices to abuse people into quitting. — fdrake

Exactly. There was a specific and general goal. The assholeness was performed utterly consciously, with a specific objective. It's not simply a personality trait.

And a number of posts here seem to be implicitly arguing that personality traits are being punished. However it is actually a strategy intended to create suffering that is being considered illegal. That was it's specific goal.

It is a form of torture in fact.

I will cause suffering using these tools to force behavior X from my victims.

I'm going to sue Cheez-it for making their Grooves product, of which the Original Cheddar has been established to be addictive. Since the package clearly states "Deep Flavor. Deep Crunch" I can only assume that they intended for me to become addicted and gain weight and have my health threatened by the 100% Real Cheese (which I doubt).

I think if you actually tried to connect your argument to the topic, it would be quite tricky, rather than simply making a reach with an analogy without directly outlining the argument.. But let's take the most charitable interpretation and work from there. If the bosses at the telecom could not be shown to have instituted abusive practices with the intention of causing people to quit, then they should be set free. If their policies and applications of policies made sense and the unpleasantness was merely an inevitable byproduct of that, then they that becomes a reasonable defense. And then it is up to a court to decide whether the intention was simply to make good business decisions or to make people suffer. Yes, if a food product has a known addictive substance in it, not unlike cigarrettes, say, and the way that chemical is used by the manufacturer is as an addictive substance and intend to addict people, sure, I think they could be liable for that. Not unlike how we treat illegal drug distributers for the same reasons. If the new bosses were making tough decisions, but reasonable ones, then I think they have a good defense. If they did things like assign people to tasks that did not suit them, for example, didn't suit their skills and training for example, this does not make good business sense so other motivations are at play. I haven't analyzed the French case. But I see no reason to per se dismiss the idea that the bosses could be shown to have been intentionally cruel, to have made decisions with the intention of punishing and torturing people to leave their jobs. Perhaps the court did a poor job of analyzing the evidence. Showing evidence of this, I think, makes more sense than the food product analogy. But if not, if the bosses did in fact intended to make people suffer enough to resign, then I'm pleased they got slapped back on by society. And they must have known what the situation was before purchasing the telecom. I think the argument that they had to institute abusive policies to be competitive doesn't hold, since it should be clear that the policies were not intended to make people suffer. Now there will be gray areas. Some restructuring might be stressful but inevitable. But from the articles it seems like there were vindictive actions taken and also decisions made that did not make business sense, but did make sense if their goal was to make people suffer. If that is the case, I don't see why that should be treated differently from more direct forms of violence where the goal is to make someone suffer.

Now let's say we had a food product company that added a step in the manufacting process such that irritating dust made the factory a very unpleasant work environment. And they did this when the workers starting union organizing. Or when it could be shown they wanted to break a long standing union. And the step in the manufacturing process did not make their product better.

I'm working on a collage-mural where the dominant background colors are blood red and a sort of turquoise-green color. Wandering through the landscape are people who vaguely look like x-rays of people, some have red antlers. Some have red wounds with black veins extending out. Some have little faces embedded in their chests or abdomens.

Since I can move the people around, I've been struck by how different they are against different backgrounds. A collection of people against the blood red appear to be ominous and victimized, although the scenery sometimes turns into roses and so violence and sex are there ("There's no sex in your violence" is a line from a Bush song that keeps going through my mind.)

When they cross over into the turquoise, things change. They somehow calm down. The red antlers are now in conflict with the calm, mossy, mistiness as if the pain has been imported and doesn't belong.

So imagine that there are worlds that are mostly red. The round red wounds with the radiating black lines just blend in with the background and nobody thinks of calling a lawyer. Then there are worlds (like France) that are mostly green and the pain and violence are just wrong. The background announces that it's wrong. If someone doesn't understand why it's wrong, all the residents of green-world will do is point to the background. It's green. The red antlers are violent. They don't belong.

From the point of view of the red-dweller, the green-land people are childish. How will they survive in the real world? They'll be gobbled up and spat out into a ditch to die!

From the point of view of the greenlanders, the red people are monstrous. They're really not. If you could pick them up and move them around, you'd see that they're all the same.

From the point of view of the greenlanders, the red people are monstrous. They're really not. If you could pick them up and move them around, you'd see that they're all the same. — frank

You don't need to demonise the Orange staff to demonstrate that what they did was wrong.

Demonstration of empathy: I'm sure there were heated boardrooms meetings where managers protested against the poor management practices, that they had lots of consternation in their guts, but believed ultimately that what they were doing was for the greater good - the good of the company and all the workers, surely it's better for the company to succeed and have all those jobs than risk going bust from firing redundancy packages? It's for the good of the employees not to put undue risk to the company; which boils down to not jeopardising the bottom line; the profit rate; and doing what needs to be done to get the organisation in a competitive state of sustainable growth.

But - you need that myth to vindicate and justify their management's conduct. You don't need any myth to demonstrate that their conduct was intentionally abusive and substantially contributed to employee suicide and sickness.

I meant that I come from redworld. I've experienced most of the things those people were subjected to. Nobody was trying to fire me, its just that working that way contributed to a manager's bonus. It doesnt show up as criminal in my world.

I'm not trying to vindicate anybody. I was looking at it more as natural history.

A new kind if person has entered my mural. When I cut out the x-ray people it leaves behind a negative-space person. That person's content IS the background.

MuuuHahahahaha!