Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

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> It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything.

I read a news article that Orange Telecom in France was being sued by a woman they had on payroll for the last 20 years doing nothing, because due to a medical condition she suffered, she became unable to do her job, and since they couldn't fire her due to France unions and labor laws, nor did they have any available job that could fit her current condition, they just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work.

It felt like reading a Monty Python skit.

But Europe is failing due to a myriad of compounding issues and structural deficits, not just because firing workers can be a Kafkaesque nightmare in some countries. European workers' unions and labor protections were even stronger 20-25 years ago and in 2004 the Euro stock market was worth more than the US stock market, while now it's worth half the US one. But that's whole different discussion where pages have to be written to encompass the whole context and cover all aspects of European economic decline. Boiling it down to crazy labor protections would be reductionist and incorrect.

That lawsuit sounds legitimate enough to me.

They couldn't find anything for her to do? Hard to believe, but if there's a reason not to fire her then then pay her the money she's owed and stop demanding she show up. Making someone come in with no tasks assigned is fun for a week and quickly turns into punishment detail. Putting someone on punishment detail because you're not allowed to fire them is Bad.

Unless she was allowed to stay home, in which case I take most of that back and it falls on her to go outside and find something to do. I can't find any articles with enough detail. But I'm still skeptical they actually couldn't find a job for her to do. It was 'just' paralysis on one side.

She had 20 years to resign if it was such a terrible ordeal

They were trying to force her to resign, so she would lose any unemployment benefits.

>They couldn't find anything for her to do? Hard to believe,

If a person's now disabled, what can a company give them to do profitably, that isn't already optimized, automated or offshored?

There's plenty of civil servants whose jobs are just moving one paper from one room to the next, just to keep more useless people employed that nobody would hire in the private sector. But this doesn't really exist as much in the private sector.

I don't think they offshored the entire office, but if they did they'd probably be able to fire her at that point.

If I found the right article, the disability is epilepsy and paralysis on one side.

Which mean she can do pretty much any office job fine. She already was doing office work, so the disability should not have changed things all that much. I'm sure she typed slower, but that can be worked around and mitigated.

>Which mean she can do pretty much any office job fine.

Honestly, I doubt it. If you show up to an interview of "any office job" with "epilepsy and paralysis on one side" nobody will hire you simply because you won't be as productive as those without such disabilities.

Also, "epilepsy and paralysis on one side" is the legal medical diagnosis, but in practice the impact can be much greater, especially with age, which is why ageism is a thing even among people who are legally in full health because in practice your body isn't the same like when you were 19-25.

But given that they already hired her, if she's going at 30-90% speed depending on task then it should be very easy to keep giving her tasks. And she can practice things like one-handed typing to improve the average.

She doesn't need the equivalent of "moving paper from one room to the next". She lost some number of dollars per hour worth of productivity, but it sounds like she was still capable of being reasonably productive.

>Ithey just kept paying her for 20 years to do nothing at work, and now she's suing them for the depression she got to get paid for no work.

It's called "mise au placard" and it's illegal. It's a technique to get people to quit by themselves, so companies don't have deal with the hassle of firing them. The lawsuit is 100% justified.

It's also very common in Japan.

Why can't they be sent on government disability instead? Forcing companies by law to keep people unfit for the job is bad for both parties.

If curious, the person is Laurence Van Wassenhove. That should suffice to find out more on the story. Interesting tale.

The anomaly there is that France Télécom was a public company at the time of the hiring, and through privatisation public servant benefits were upheld for existing employees, which blocked most unpythonesque solutions.

If she had been hired after, it would have taken time but she would have been found unfit for work (she had epilepsy and hemiplegia), her contract terminated, and she would have most likely received a handicap pension instead.

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