Company charged with institutional harassment after aggressive job-cutting exercise in 2008
Former France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard at Paris’s courthouse during the trial of several former members of the telecoms giant’s management, a decade after a wave of suicides. Picture: AFP/STEPHANE DE SAKUTINA French court will rule on Friday whether the former CEO of France Telecom and other executives carried out “institutional harassment” that sparked a spate of suicides at the company.
Prosecutors sought a one-year prison term for former chief Didier Lombard and the maximum fine of €15,000 during a trial that wrapped up in July. France Telecom itself was charged with “institutional harassment” and faces a fine of up to €75,000. Her colleague Francoise Benezech denounced an “obsession” with cutting 22,000 jobs out of 120,000 in three years as part of the strategic overhauls, saying it had become the company’s raison d’être.Lombard denied that management bore any responsibility for the deaths, despite having told managers in 2006 that he would “get people to leave one way or another, either through the window or the door”.
Some of the victims, including one who jumped out of a fifth-floor window in front of her colleagues, left notes expressing deep unhappiness at work. In July 2009, a 51-year-old technician from Marseille killed himself, leaving a letter accusing bosses of “management by terror”.
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