Through the window or through the door, the film documenting the so-called France Telecom suicide crisis, was released in cinemas on November 8. Its title refers to the infamous phrase pronounced by Didier Lombard. During an executive seminar in October 2006, the CEO of the operator ordered his teams to send some 22,000 employees “out the window or out the door”, failing to convince them to volunteer initially.
This toxic management will have led to an unprecedented wave of suicides, i.e. 35 desperate actions in 2008 and 2009 alone. Not to mention the increase in heart attacks, strokes, cases of depression and sick leave. If the leaders have since been criminally convicted, this crisis has left an indelible trauma within the historic operator. The reorganizations which have multiplied since the arrival as general management of Christel Heydemann in April 2022 have, according to the unions, revived bad memories.
Disguised social plan, relocations, pressure on employees
“The new team, gradually set up over the past two years, with a relatively poor grasp of the culture and professions of Orange, adopts a policy of social violence with disturbing analogies with those of the Lombard era,” believes the CFE-CGC. “The obsession with cost reduction, the desire to resort to offshoring, subcontracting, and to eliminate jobs in France is back. »
The new management first restructured its loss-making business branch, Orange Business, by launching a voluntary departure plan (PDV) affecting 643 positions. For the CFE-CGC, it is in fact a disguised social plan (PSE) in order to “benefit from social and tax advantages to reduce the cost of departures”, the management having announced to the staff that, whatever in any case, the positions identified for the PDV would be eliminated.
For the first union organization at Orange, “jobs are in no way eliminated due to a sharp decline in activity, but are subject to relocation to Mauritius, Madagascar or India”. Drawing a parallel again with the management under Didier Lombard, the management would use “the loophole which exists in the status of the civil service to organize the forced mobility, both functional and geographical, of civil servants whose position is abolished”.
According to the union, “staff targeted for job abolition will be subject to very strong pressure: leaving with a check via the voluntary departure plan, choosing a position of lesser interest – no reclassification system worthy of the name being planned – or being fired.”
Sale of Orange Bank, large-scale real estate plan
The social climate is tense in other divisions. Starting with Orange Bank, whose takeover should lead to a “discount” PSE and “aiming to make redundancies at the lowest cost”. Employees of the customer relations center, based in Amiens, are said to be “particularly distressed by the closure of the activity and few of them imagine themselves becoming simple telephone salespeople”.
The store staff, in fact, take a dim view of the end of this banking activity which constituted part of their variable remuneration. And this, “without any compensation being provided. Which creates, in this period of inflation, a significant drop in income putting them in a situation of stress.” To add to the concern, Orange plans to transfer some of its in-store salespeople to a subsidiary with a lower collective agreement.
Finally, the CFE-CGC mentions management’s objective of reducing its tertiary surface area by 26% by 2025. By reducing the number of sites and densifying those that will be retained, this large-scale real estate plan will, according to the union, degrade working conditions and work-life balance. “Transport times will explode and office discomfort will increase. »
Around ten suicides in 2022 and 2023
For all these reasons, the CFE-CGC decided to relaunch the Observatory of Stress and Forced Mobility that it had created with the Sud union in 2007. “It is at the origin of the work which made it possible to understand the mechanisms of social violence implemented at France Telecom, which led certain colleagues to end their lives,” recalls the organization.
In fact, the specter of a new suicide crisis has resurfaced in recent months. According to a survey of Mariannearound ten employees would have ended their lives in 2022 and 2023. If the reasons leading to this desperate gesture are complex and multifactorial, three of these tragedies have already been recognized by the company as “accidents on duty “.
According to the magazine, these employees are all in their fifties and most have civil servant status, as in the Lombard era. The article lists the bumpy paths of engineers or technicians who ended their lives following an overload of work or a blocked professional future. Independent surveys were carried out by the Technologia firm, a specialist in the prevention of psychosocial risks. He had already intervened… during the France Telecom suicide crisis.