France Telecom's bit :
Please note that the numbers of suicides at France Telecom was not even statistically so high :
https://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/85841/suicides-a-france-... (yeah google translate)
> Analysons en effet avec objectivité les chiffres concernant ce sujet grave. Le nombre annuel de suicides parmi les employés du groupe France Telecom sur le territoire français a été de 28 en 2000, 23 en 2001, 23 en 2002, 22 en 2003, 13 en 2008, 19 en 2009, 25 en 2010.
> le « taux de suicide théorique » atteint alors près de 16,9 pour 100 000. Ainsi, le taux de suicide constaté chez France Télécom à 19 pour 100 000
Taking into account the age, male/female repartition and the industry average, these are the 2 numbers : 17/100000 vs 19/100000. You can check other countries suicides rates for these population to notice it's not abnormal - people got sick.
So what has happened : some people squarely laid the blame on the employer for their suicide in notes or letters (one such letter being written 2 years before the act - 2 years to react). The cases were hugely publicized.
I am pretty sure work(place) issues are a major cause of suicide, being the bread winning activity & so consuming so many hours and human interaction. Lack of work is a bigger factor too when you look at suicide frequency between active / inactive adults.
Hope this give a more open view than "bad management - no donut".
France bit :
It was really hard to fire people in France. The employee needs to messed up pretty big. It's next to impossible to fire public servants. The absolute opposite is the USA, where managers can fire their subordinates almost instantly (which brings in a bigger lot of issues and abuse).
So how do a team get rid of someone screwing up, not working, not team-playing, even actively hindering the team ? You don't. At best, you can put this employee to a new team or assign it a useless project (or more exactly, a project that the company accepts will never get finished). If the under performing employee does not want to be trained for new jobs, no consequences for him/her. Public service in France is ridden with such people, and government is paying twice for their work : once in their salary, once in the salary of someone actually doing it or a private contractor. I have work with&for such people and it's horrible.
So French management have these horrible & convoluted ways to make people leave the company. Giving them useless assignments, always poor performances reviews, etc.
French employees are very very well protected (thanks to decades of unions fighting) and it's much much better to be employed by French corporations than USA or British ones.
Nowadays, we might have reached a point where the downsides of this protection on economic performance are doubled by necessary hypocrisy in management. The social contract "work for the company, get paid for your work" is not holding. You can get paid without working. And you can work without getting paid enough (but I dare say it's the rarer of both in France).
It's changing under Macron's reforms which disgruntled privileged workers and which worried unprivileged ones. Now, there is a upper bound cost for firing someone & companies can plan on it. Remember, when fired, we got unemployment benefits + company's compensation. You also got the state's benefits when both you and the company agrees on you leaving the company.
Americans have no idea how amazing our social welfare is. And Frenches have no idea either.