France puzzled by high workplace suicide rate

Bloomberg News

GUYANCOURT, France — Francis Le Bras discovered he’d become a corporate nobody when his name disappeared from the organizational chart on the wall of his Paris office. In 2008, Le Bras’s employer, France Telecom, cut his job as a writer of software applications for Minitel, a pre-Internet information service for telephone users. While Le Bras, 56, stayed on the payroll, he had no job title, and he says he was shunned by his colleagues.

“Suddenly, I was nothing,” says Le Bras, who’s taking antidepressants while on long-term sick leave at his home in the Paris suburb of Guyancourt. “People didn’t look at me. They didn’t know I was there. I thought of suicide.”

Le Bras says the support of his wife and three children saved him from adding his name to a dismal roster at France Telecom, the former state monopoly that’s still 27 percent owned by French taxpayers. Since January 2008, 34 France Telecom employees have committed suicide, the company says. They killed themselves because of work-related stress, according to labor unions and relatives.

On Sept. 15, four days after a 32-year-old France Telecom employee identified publicly only as Stephanie jumped to her death from an office window, Nicolas Sarkozy’s government intervened. French Labor Minister Xavier Darcos ordered France Telecom Chief Executive Officer Didier Lombard to meet with unions to find ways to reduce stress and detect potentially suicidal behavior.

Those deaths have triggered a national debate about whether they’re evidence of a wider malaise in French factories and offices. France may be the land of the 35-hour workweek and the monthlong summer vacation, yet it had a suicide rate of 17.6 per 100,000 people in 2005, the third highest among Group of Eight countries. Russia and Japan were first and second.

Workplace suicides aren’t limited to France Telecom. Three employees killed themselves within the space of four months in late 2006 and early 2007 at carmaker Renault’s technical development center near Paris. In 2008, there were 12 suicides directly resulting from work-related stress in French banks, according to the Syndicat National de la Banque et du Credit, a financial industry labor union.

France’s remote, impersonal management culture creates tense, conflict-ridden workplaces, says Patrick Legeron, a psychiatrist and CEO of Stimulus, a Paris-based company that advises employers and unions on how to reduce job-related mental illness.

France’s 35-hour workweek, in force for large companies since 2000 and for small businesses since 2002, raises the heat for employees with managers determined to make their financial targets, says Bernard Salengro, president of the Syndicat des Medecins du Travail, the national association for doctors who conduct health checks on workers.

“Employers are trying to squeeze even more work out of their employees to get back the missing five hours,” Salengro says. “It lays the ground for the increase of stress and violence at work.”

Even with reduced hours, France remains competitive. In 2008, it had the highest hourly productivity among the European Union’s largest economies, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. France scored 98.2 for gross domestic product per hour compared with 92.8 for Germany, 83.1 for Britain and 73 for Italy.

At France Telecom, unions, workers and academics say, the combination of global competition and French job protection rules helped create a brutal corporate culture. Two-thirds of France Telecom’s 103,000-strong domestic work force can’t be fired because they’re classified as civil servants. The company has still reduced its France-based payroll by about 15,000 since 2006.

“France Telecom used to live off voluntary departures, retirements and buying people out to shrink its payroll, but now they can’t do it the old-fashioned way,” says Bill Stewart, a professor of business administration at the American University of Paris. “Managers are clearly under pressure to make their head-count numbers, but they can’t easily get rid of people.”

For Le Bras, any change in the corporate culture can’t come soon enough.

After a sick leave, Le Bras says he’s looking forward to returning to a new position as part of the team maintaining Minitel, the information service that’s been overtaken by online search engines.