THE “WORLD”’S OPINION – MUST SEE
The title of this film takes up the words, obscene to say the least, of Didier Lombard, CEO of France Telecom from 2005 to 2010, during a training seminar for company executives in October 2006 at the Maison de la Chimie, in Paris. Responsible with his seconds Louis-Pierre Wenès (“cost killer”) and Olivier Barberot (HRD) to make the company profitable while the war rages on the French telephone market, Didier Lombard intends here to motivate his management troops to eject, therefore, “through the window or through the door” 22,000 employees, failing to convince them of the justification for their voluntary departure.
What followed from this employers’ offensive was, we remember, an unprecedented wave of suicides (twenty-three in 2009 alone, not to mention the increase in heart attacks, strokes and other chronic depressions). ) among the employees of this company, to the point that the scandal of their revelation led, on the one hand, to the ouster of the CEO and his henchmen, and, on the other hand, to the holding, many years later , of a due process. So on December 20, 2019, the criminal court found Didier Lombard and Louis-Pierre Wenès guilty, bringing the notion of “institutional moral harassment” into case law. The court of appeal will confirm the conviction in September 2022 but will reduce the sentences to one year in prison and a fine of 15,000 euros.
This film, which aims to tell this story and made as such following other works on the subject, has the particularity of having been produced at the initiative of a collective of trade unionists from France Telecom. It actually reveals the desire to make heard from the inside the long and difficult fight waged, for many years, by the company’s unions to denounce, beneath its exterior of technocratic rationality, the wildly ideological and uninhibited management of the triumvirate. who had taken the lead. In this respect, the film could bring to mind the creation of the Medvedkine groups with workers from the region of Sochaux and Besançon (Doubs) in the 1960s and 1970s, a major aesthetic-political experience of militant cinema supported then by Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker.
Historical depth
However, it is not on the same utopian bases of the appropriation of the filmic tool by the workers that Through the window or through the door. It is essentially about sharing, in a classic form document entrusted to a professional (director Jean-Pierre Bloc), a trade unionist experience, in which the film fulfills its mission very honestly. He does this first by resituating the story in its historical depth: the flourishing state enterprise of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones (PTT) in the 1960s, its aging, the slow privatization from the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s with the departure of 40,000 civil servants in ten years and the entry into the stock market, chronic debt, the arrival of the white knights of shock neoliberalism in 2005, the decision of the unions, finally, since there is also very dead man, to bring the case to criminal proceedings in 2009.
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