by Bob Walsh
Orange is a huge French Telecom company. Orange has been convicted of "collective moral harassment" and seven of its executives, including the HMFIC, have been sentenced to prison terms and significant fines for "repeated acts having as their object or effect a deterioration of an employee's working conditions" in ways that infringe on the dignity and rights of the workers.
The company is not appealing the case, though lawyers for the individuals sentenced have announced they ARE appealing.
The incidents occurred mostly in 2008 and 2009 during radical downsizing. Under French law it is damn near impossible to just lay off employees so they applied "social violence as a method of management" to pressure 22,000 people to leave. These included closing down individual offices and forcing people to move repeatedly, ramping up workloads and hypermonitoring and harassment of people on the job, including hassling them over bathroom breaks. Many of the 19 suicides under exam occurred on company property.
The CEO, Didier Lombard, was quoted as saying, "I'll get them out one way or another, through the door or through the window." The judge was not amused.
The company is still largely owned by the French government. Privatization started in 1990. The company employees now about 148,000 people.
I am not sure how I feel about this, but since they are a pack of Frenchmen I am not sure how much I care. They certainly behaved like assholes towards their employees so my sympathy is much more towards the abused employees than the asshole suits.
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