Edit: I'm not justifying the harassment: I am speaking only about the larger labor market.
Not harass and screw with the employees to the point of suicide.
Sometimes a work-around to the problem is not better than an actual solution, no matter how painful the solution may be.
The "Via the window or the door" comment just shows how much they didn't give a damn about their employees as actual human beings.
Because the press and people in France are know to be very sympathetic to tear-jerk stories from major Telecom companies?
The disregard for human beings isn't ok, but the alternative here is the company going bankrupt, firing all 130k employees, and prompting the sale of French Telecom infrastructure to foreign corporations at a discount via liquidation. I'm for that compared to harassment to suicide, but let's not pretend there's a happy alternative where everybody gets together and saves the company.
Get laws changed to allow for the firing and since it would be done publicly you can make sure the populace would pressure the government to give aid to those fired.
According to other posts it is apparently not as hard to fire state employees as is made out in the article but it costs extra money, so company paids the one-time redundency costs, shit happens, company eats the cost (and maybe the gov loans / bails them out to cover this one time cost)
There is an entire range of possible options, presenting it as a black and white "Necessary evil to prevent $ABSOLUTE_WORST_CASE_SCENARIO" is justifying the worst behaviour.
> But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.
> So the executives resolved to make life so unbearable that the workers would leave, prosecutors say.
Should they have been able to fire them? I don't know. But this is something different.
most large businesses don't have good reasons to fire a huge chunk of their workforce, except for delivering more money to rich shareholders.
Consequently it is much better for shareholders to push them to leave by making their life miserable, and it's exactly what they did....
Their salaries would be paid by the public anyway, factored into the price of the company's product.
Isn't it also humiliating to be paid for useless work? I think it can be better for the "victim" to be fired, too, so that they can find a more useful occupation.
How do people actually feel avout paying people for doing useless work? I personally find it quite enraging at times.
Where in the article is the "taking it up with the government" part? Shouldn't government take part of the blame?
taxpayers ~= shareholders
Laying off people to balance the books is a novel concept, introduced in the 80s. What leads you to think you can't build a business without it?
Fire X (X = less than all) employees or do nothing and all employees will lose their job. Assuming some portion of employees will commit suicide from the job loss, this is the best outcome.
It is not.
The problem here is that no firing has been done. They harassed they own employees close to suicide to make them leave instead of paying them to leave.... That's the problem and that's why they are in court.