Corporate Suicides in France

About 24 employees of France Télécom have killed themselves in the past 18 months, and most of them have been tied directly to the workplace environment, and particularly insecurity and stress. The story has been well-covered in France, and the NYT has a piece in English on what has become a huge story about the effects of workplace unhappiness that underlies the bollocks about "lifetime employment" and how good everybody with a job really has it.

Productivity gains are often attributed to technology, but the are more likely to come from overwork and other conditions that cause stress.  The U.S. professional workforce has more or less abandoned the 40 hour week - and they don't get paid for extra hours.  The toll on quality of life is basically ignored, because in the post-Cold War period quality of life has taken a back seat to sheer production, growth, and wealth as the measures of all things, drowning out peoples' voices and actual experiences that should be making the rules and not the other way around.

Unhappy Furloughs

I'll soon discuss the Obama reforms, but meanwhile blood flows in the trenches. The NYT had a good piece on furloughs, the new work-for-nothing strategy (as it turns out in practice). But the most telling moment in the piece was about fear and secrecy at work:

Ms. Roberson and Mr. Becht were among the few people interviewed for this article who were willing to allow their names to be published. Others asked to have their names and workplaces withheld out of fear of retribution from bosses or colleagues. And some were hesitant to complain openly about their employment situation, given how many of their friends and family members had lost jobs.

“You’re not sure what they’re watching,” one furloughed man, an online salesman in Chicago, said about his bosses. “Do some people feel that they have to work those hours? Yes.”

The US workplace has gotten so despotic that it flatly contradicts the US conception of itself as democratic. Employers are displaying almost no interest either in the welfare of their employees or even in the reduced effectiveness of workers who skulk like punished dogs.

One of my colleagues in Grenoble remarked today that people are being asked to fit the work rather than the work fitting the people. It's true, and this self-imposed darwinism is so advanced in the US that it has become almost invisible.

More examples:
23% wages cuts at the Globe = survival.
firing 400 people = creating an innovation culture.

They should just say we have no ideas, but this way we spend less of our money.