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I very vaguely remember a story, (though I can't remember which company, but since it's probably corporate propaganda that's fine anyway).

The story goes that you have a company with lots of industrial manufacturing facilities distributed across the country. In one of them there is an accident which leads to the death of workers.

As soon as possible, the big boss at the main office orders the plant manager to fly over and when the manager enters the office, the boss asks "Why did you kill these men?" The manager is flusters and protests they did everything they could, was not to blame, etc. etc.

I don't know if the manager was fired or demoted, but if he wasn't that sends a message through the organization that you can fk up or be negligent and still keep your job.

Anyway, the point is that all of this is a top down corporate culture problem. If the highest level doesn't understand that they are responsible for this, and if they don't enforce a culture of responsibility all the way down the line, then you will get outcomes like at France Télécom or much worse a culture like at Union Carbide that lead to the Bhopal disaster.

Looking at the Bhopal disaster I guess you could say it's also an external accountability problem. If there's not some external entity like a government to hold the company and executives liable, or an insurance company that makes them pay through the nose if they are negligent, then the quarterly earnings cycle will lead to increased risk for employees.

Insurance premiums are perhaps a more practical way to set the right incentives, as they give much more immediate feedback than intermittent disasters. If executives can point to safety measures they have taken and the reduction in premiums that were enabled by that, then perhaps even the most narrow-mindedly short term profit seeking execs/board members/shareholders will do what is right for the safety of employees.

Sounds like you're thinking of Paul O'Neill and Alcoa. He figured out that worker safety was a proxy for a whole bunch of other metrics at Alcoa.

He had everyone focus intensely on safety. Worker accidents went down massively. As a byproduct, costs went down and productivity went up.

Any serious incident has to be reported up, was investigated, and was treated very seriously.

Note that while this likely generalizes to other places, it doesn't necessarily generalize to every place. I could conceive of some setups where safety and profits were opposed. But in Alcoa's case, O'Neill was able to use safety as a driver for other changes.

You don’t need to even go that far.

One place I did a little work for had some safety culture problems in the field services teams, especially with digging equipment. The culture was very focused on grilling the employees in why they screwed up. New management came in and basically made the foremen and managers do a bunch of postmortem reviews and made them generally uncomfortable by making them accountable. Incidents went down dramatically, eventually going to near-zero after about 3 years.

In a more white collar setting, imo these issues are about people who rule by fear, either because that is how they are managed, or because they lack the competence to work any other way.

They were not prosecuted for the suicides themselves, which the judge considered to have multiple causes. They were only prosecuted for institutional harassment.

What is 'crazy pills; is that any reasonable person would hold them accountable for this.

This is populist lynching.

First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.

It's a huge misrepresentation to talk about a 'rash of suicides' that's just about the statistical norm.

Second - having lived and worked in France, I can assure you that workplaces are generally not toxic nearly to the degree that you see in the USA. The hours are short, and vacations are long.

In France employees literally kidnap managers by blockading them in their offices with furniture during union negotiations.

Third - is the degree to which negative work conditions actually affect life outcomes. So it's clear there were several policies in place that were not very nice - but this happens all the time in the world. An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.

If a factory closes and employees are laid off, does the business then become responsible if people kill themselves over it? No.

What needs to happen here is an investigation into what actually happened, to try to fix the issues in a reasonable way.

Instead - we got a kangaroo court.

French workers and management have been in a really tense standoff now for a couple of decades (well, leftover from a few hundred years ago) and it's not going well.

I literally live in an are of Montreal where tons of young, educated people are moving because the French system in their words is 'breaking down'. Few people believe in the work, it's very risky to hire people because they can't be let go, taxes are insanely high (>50% income tax after a 24% employment tax), systematically high levels of inequality and a serious problem with integration of new migrants that has little parallel in North America.

This was a political answer to a problem that needs real solutions.

> Third - is the degree to which negative work conditions actually affect life outcomes. So it's clear there were several policies in place that were not very nice - but this happens all the time in the world. An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.

> If a factory closes and employees are laid off, does the business then become responsible if people kill themselves over it? No.

A common (mis)management technique used in France is called "placardisation" (literally "put someone in the closet"). Rather than laying off people, drive them to nervous breakdown and ensure that they quit. I've survived this once and I can tell you that it's not pretty. That's the kind of practice that was being tried.

(I've written something a bit more detailed in another comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21856307 )

> Instead - we got a kangaroo court.

The investigation lasted years. What makes you claim that it's a kangaroo court?

"Placardisation" is totally a thing. Contrary to anglo-saxon culture, to this day, failure is not an option for French management. And having to fire someone is failure. So the alternative is often harrasment.

Note that `placardisation` (lmao) is not only a French thing, but is a Northeast Asia thing as well.

Interesting, I didn't know that.

Does this reach the point where the practice has a "cute" name over there, too?

It's also an American thing even though they don't have a word for it. It was even referenced in the Silicon Valley Season 1, where Bighetti is "sent to the roof" to do nothing, because the CEO does not believe in firing people.

I’ve heard it referred to as “getting managed out.”

Involuntary resting and vesting

Very much an American thing. During the first dotcom bubble the company who bought mine turned out to have a habit of getting rid of CTOs who had golden parachutes by ordering other employees to not talk to them and giving them a supposedly nice office on an unfinished, empty floor of a skyscraper where all the lights outside their office were disconnected. One held out long enough to launch his new startup and I was pretty impressed that he put it together in semi-squat conditions while being shunned. When it comes to cheating people on contracts there are a lot of determined, creative people in management and on boards.

Isn’t it the same thing as mobbing? Extreme mobbing

You have this problem of exiling people in-place because the labor regulations make it absurdly difficult to fire people. You see the same thing in school department "rubber rooms" or union shops that tell the useless guys to go count bolts and stay out of the way.

It's better for everyone if you can just shitcan people when things aren't working out.

Well, this would make (some) sense if actually firing someone was nigh-impossible. But in France, it's actually not that hard. You just have to explicitly tell them why, fill a few forms and pay the severance package.

> taxes are insanely high (>50% income tax after a 24% employment tax)

This is a lie. The top bracket is at 45% above €156.244. This means it is mathematically impossible to pay more than 45% in income taxes, let alone more than 50%.

> systematically high levels of inequality

Yes, there is, but France has a lower Gini index than Canada, so hearing that criticism coming from expats to that country is a bit hypocritical.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

You’re only talking about the “income tax” (IR), leaving out the CSG, a flat tax on income, and the various social contributions, which are based on labour income. The CSG brings more money to the Government than the IR, anyway.

Canada is a considerably more opportunistic country than France in every way. I love French culture and they make many things, but for people looking to get ahead, especially migrants, there is no comparison.

Your rebuttals don't help: a 45% max tax (instead of 50%) + ~25% payroll tax + 20% VAT is really quite a hostile.

The difference in GINI between Canada and France is really quite small, unfortunately, there's nothing to be proud of when 'everyone is at the same level of poverty'.

The culture is boring in Canada, but almost 'everything works' well - civil government, low levels of corruption etc..

My brother is essentially 'working class' and he and his wife live a nice, big new home (that they can afford), they have every material pleasure one could imagine, an impossible achievement in most of France.

I still love France but it's not a fully functional state.

> This is populist lynching.

How so? It seems to have been an orderly trial.

> First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.

One could argue with this characterization that Lombard himself made all the time. But at any rate, they weren't prosecuted for the suicides, only for institutional harassment.

> An 'easier' route would have been for Orange to simply have done a big layoff.

This is indeed what Orange did in every other country but France. You can look up what happened in Poland to TPSA for example, and it took place everywhere else.

Orange was not able to do layoffs in France because of statutory employment guarantees provided to much of the civil servant workforce.

One can certainly disagree with such a policy — it is nuts to guarantee jobs for life in an industry where the jobs 10 years from now are completely different from the jobs to do now — but it is another thing to use a disagreement with this policy in order to justify rolling out harassment techniques as a way to downsize. It's like faulting the employees for taking a good deal decades ago — the government didn't have to offer the deal back then.

There have to be limits to management's ability to instill a climate of fear, as the consequences are real (not talking specifically about the suicides here, as the policy had many other negative outcomes).

> One can certainly disagree with such a policy — it is nuts to guarantee jobs for life in an industry where the jobs 10 years from now are completely different from the jobs to do now — but it is another thing to use a disagreement with this policy in order to justify rolling out harassment techniques as a way to downsize. It's like faulting the employees for taking a good deal decades ago — the government didn't have to offer the deal back then.

I like the way you phrase it.

"How so? It seems to have been an orderly trial."

Because you can't blame employers for the personal actions of employees.

It's political because there was a narrative created in France that 'Orange is an evil place that drove this to happen' and people wanted to see supposed 'accountability'.

The trial is red meat to appease the plebes.

The unemployment rate in France is 8.5%, whereas in the US and Canada, it's less than 1/2 that, in Germany it's 3.1% (!).

The laws there to supposedly protect French workers form layoffs are clearly not working and are probably having the opposite effect.

You keep bringing up something I agree with, regarding the counterproductive effect of labor protection laws. I just don't see how that excuses the lawlessness of management's actions.

> Because you can't blame employers for the personal actions of employees.

I'm unsure what you're referring to, but that's untrue, thankfully. If managers direct their employees to perform illegal actions, they too can be held liable. Nothing so brazen here, but willfully turning a blind eye to, or rewarding middle managers applying severely distressing psychological pressure (meaningless assignments, etc) is something that they chose to do way past the warning signs. I also don't think the sanction is disproportionate, nobody goes to jail, and the fine is modest. But I wouldn't put the square quotes around accountability.

> First - the rate of suicides at Orange during this time were pretty much on par with suicide rates in France overall. Orange has 100K employees, and there are going to be suicides every year.

There were 35 suicides in ~ 32,000 workers, not 100,000.

90 000 directly in France, at least [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A.

The 32 suicides were reported amongst the 32,000 people whose jobs were affected.

The problem is that those who make the laws are the same than those who have the money or are really close friends.

As long as there is no janitors running for office, not much will happen. People will forget soon enough.

Check the Desmarais family[0].

[0]: https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/dynasties-6-the-desma...

The workers chose to work there and chose to kill themselves.

Do we not expect people to have agency anymore?

All employees are free to leave... That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. But the specific outcome here, I. s. suicide, is fiendishly difficult link to any one cause.

The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?

> All employees are free to leave...

That's a pretty poor excuse for misbehavior. Similar to "if you don't like this country, you should leave".

I don’t think it is. The problem with that statement is that leaving a country is a huge transition, with plenty of costs, and unclear rewards.

Leaving a job is sometimes a big deal, but it’s never as serious. One could argue that the more serious it is for your the greater the problem in question is because you don’t have any skills deemed valuable by your current employer or potential employers.

What to do with useless white collar labor is a hard problem. Mistreating people is a bad idea, but you need to do “something” otherwise you’ll eventually just go out of business if firing them is not an option.

Globalism is hard.

> That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law.

Literally right after the bit you quoted.

> All employees are free to leave...

You're literally saying "This job is a necessary part of our society, and while you personally might not want to tolerate the {harassment/low pay/terrible conditions}, someone else has to."

> Employees are free to leave

Those jobs were civil servants with lifetime job guarantee in what was, at the time of hiring, a public company.

Of course the whole question is how to transition to private company with private employment, but that doesn’t cancel the fact that civil servants had made serious concessions to get a lifetime job (lower grade than what they could get in the private sector after their diploma, in exchange for lifetime security), which artificially put them in a weak negotiation position (few savings, mental dedication to only one speciality).

I'd consider 35 people who felt that suicide was better than leaving is a pretty solid display of why that argument doesn't work.

How does that 35 compare to the base population rate of suicide?

If it’s within a small margin, I’d conclude that’s a pretty solid display that people are people and some decide to kill themselves.

If we start with the assumption that harrasment cause suicides then that argument means that it's ok to harras people as much as others do on average.

Obviously there is other causes also. But the base principel is a very shaky foundation to build a legal framework on.

Why start with the assumption that harassment causes suicide? We could just as well start with the assumption that vaccines cause autism.

We should use our intuition to ask questions rather than to answer them.

This is, in essence, the argument that the CEO made, during the crisis and at the trial. He kept saying (paraphrasing here) that there was no statically significant increase in the rate of suicides, and because the company was so huge it was bound to have employees killing themselves from time to time, regardless of what management did or didn't do. According to him, the whole affair was a pure media campaign orchestrated by people who disagreed with his management of the company.

The incredibly insensitive delivery of this argument cost the man his job years ago. The immense grief of families and coworkers, the fact that the suicides appeared to be work-related (and sometimes even happening at the workplace), the scathing reports by medical inspectors seemed all irrelevant to the dude, who basically just looked at this as a statistic to be managed. His lack of public displays of empathy or desire for introspection was pretty disturbing.

You may want to look into Base rate fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

A foundational text of sociology is Durkheim's Suicide, based precisely on the premise that the act itself is undeniable, that bodies are very hard to hide, and that the motivations, if not an extreme of altruism, are an extreme of either loss of social context (individuation), or complete hopelessness (fatalism).

Suicide has been chosen as its subject, among the various subjects that we have had occasion to study in our teaching career, because few are more accurately to be defined.... Suicide as it exists today is precisely one of the forms through which the collective affection from which we suffer is transmitted; thus it will aid us to understand this.... [I]n common terms, suicide is pre-eminently the desperate act of one who does not care to live.

Moreover, of population suicide rates:

Not only is this rate constant for long periods, but its invariability is even greater than that of leading demographic data.

That is, deviations from norm are intrinsically significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book)

https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci...

The problem with a suicide cluster isn't in determining the cause. It's the fact itself.

There's also genetic predilections for suicide.

Those are exceedingly unlikely to 1) create variances over time or 2) company-specific clusters.

The broader concept is itself well-addressed in Durkheim's book in terms of regional and cultural variances in base rates.

It's ridiculous.

Why is hurting one person with a knife to get wallet punished more than hurting tens of thousands of people to get better results in Excel?

It's obvious that if you're rich, you get away with anything and the justice system is just a farce.

One crime is legible to the masses, the other is not. The crimes are in no way parallel.

Agree the justice system is a farce .

Muggers don't bring lower prices, numbers in excel sheets does. Your average consumer will accept a mountain of skeletons in the closet if it comes with 10% lower prices.