High-profile cases involving France Telecom and Renault led to review of work pressures, but are companies doing enough?

Many imagine France as a country with never-ending vacations and long leisurely lunches. Yet while there is a grain of truth in this, the reality is that the French workplace has been simmering with pent-up pressure since long before the 2008 crisis.

A recent study by the Paris-based consulting firm Technologia has found that more than three million French workers are at a high risk of burnout. Tales of work-related suicides in the French media over the past eight years seem to support these statistics.

Two of the perhaps most high-profile cases involved France Telecom (rebranded Orange in 2013) and Renault. The former's CEO, Didier Lombard, and two top executives resigned in early 2010 following 35 suicides in 2008 and 2009. They were subsequently indicted in May 2012, along with the company itself, under criminal law for workplace bullying. The case is still before the courts.

At the same time, a French court of appeals found car maker Renault guilty of gross negligence in May 2012 with regard to three suicides in 2006 and 2007.

Both of these events are a first in France, with potentially wide-ranging consequences. "France Telecom and its top executives being in criminal proceedings, sends a strong message to the business community," says Loïc Lerouge, a researcher and leading specialist in psychosocial risks at the Université Montesquieu-Bordeaux IV.

More recently, in January, the suicide of an Orange employee on the Paris metro reinforced the debate with the CGT, France's second largest union confederation, claiming that it could be linked to the pressures of work. A statement from Orange said that the worker had seemed to be experiencing difficulties for the last few months and that a meeting had been arranged to propose professional support measures.

Corporate action

Nicolas Barrier, the HR Director of Renault's massive R&D site Technocentre, where the suicides took place, details how Renault has been busy revamping the way it manages its staff in France in the past six years.

"Starting in 2007, Carlos Ghosn decided to put in place a management team at the centre, which employs over 10,000 people," Mr. Barrier explains, under the watchful eye of a PR rep. "We decided to create a plan to improve the working conditions of our teams. It's based on three things: bringing management closer to employees and training managers to know about psychosocial risks, regulating workload and ensuring adequate resources to get the job done, and creating warning and alert mechanisms for at-risk people."

Jean-Claude Délgènes, the founder and CEO of Technologia, which specialises in preventing work-related psychosocial risks, has dealt with no fewer than 73 work-related suicides since 2008. Despite these alarming figures, he feels that a lot of companies have improved risk prevention in the past few years.

The key to understanding the French - and in fact European - legal context is a 1989 occupational health and safety directive, which requires EU member states to encourage improvements in, and safeguard, the safety and health of workers.

In France, two events in the early 2000s drastically altered this emphasis on precautionary measures. The first was a landmark decision in an asbestos case made by one of France's highest courts, la Cour de Cassation, in 2002, shifting the burden of proof from people to companies in cases involving work-related illnesses.

The second was a decree issued by the government following the massive explosion of the AZF chemical factory in September 2001 (which resulted in 29 deaths), requiring companies to evaluate all possible occupational risks and detail them in one sole document.

The upshot of these two measures is that it is no longer enough for companies in France to take steps to prevent risks; they must ensure the results as well.

French occupational psychiatrist Christophe Dejours, who holds the occupational psychology chair at the Paris Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, believes France reached a tipping point in 2009 with the events at France Telecom.

"Three factors played a major role," he explains. "One, the media all of a sudden began to cover the suicides, whereas before they hadn't been, and, more importantly, they wouldn't let up. Two, it became part of the culture, with books and movies about it. And three, pressure from court cases pushed the MEDEF [the French employers' union] and the government to take the matter seriously."

For his part, Délgènes feels that despite these advances, France has been less effective at getting at the root causes, which he feels lie in the wide-reaching changes that have taken place in the workplace over the past fifteen years.

New pressures in a new workplace

"Things started changing in the mid-90s, when shareholders started becoming a dominant force, placing more pressure on top management," he explains. "At the same time, everything became structured around the digital economy. Time is now accelerated and work can be controlled much more precisely, leading to management by objective."

Occupational health physician Agnès Martineau-Arbes, who consults for Technologia, says that serious impacts on health have been observed. "We are seeing more and more otherwise perfectly healthy executives with a relatively high socioeconomic status suffering from strokes," she says.

"Burnout itself is not something new. It was first observed among executives in the 1950s in the US by insurance companies. The terms were different but the phenomenon was there. What has changed today is that top executives are no longer immune," says Dejours.

Yet, as Dejours puts it, despite these extreme cases "work can also be a source of fulfilment and pleasure". "Quite simply," he says, "it can often be - and should always be - better to work than not to work."

Richard Venturi is an economics teacher at the Paris Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and freelance journalist living in Paris