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A French court recently became the first to recognize the crime of “institutional harassment,” where managers intentionally degrade working conditions and create an anxiety-provoking climate to pressure workers to quit.
The case involved the former state-owned France Télécom, which is now called Orange. The company was experiencing a $50 million revenue shortfall in 2006 when a group of executives devised a plan to make working conditions so horrible that 22,000 employees would voluntarily quit.
Nineteen employees killed themselves, 12 attempted suicide and eight workers suffered from acute, debilitating depression. Some of the workers, including a woman who jumped out a fifth-floor window in front of her colleagues, left notes expressing deep unhappiness at work or saying the company had made their lives unbearable.
Several top executives were found criminally liable for “institutional harassment” last month.
There appear to be loose parallels between the Télécom case and several civil age discrimination lawsuits filed in the United States against IBM.
A federal class action lawsuit filed in New York earlier this year alleges that top executives at IBM in 2014 hatched a company-wide plan to eliminate older employees through large-scale discriminatory layoffs—called “Resource Actions.”
Among other things, IBM allegedly manipulated the performance review process by directing managers to reduce the annual performance ratings for older workers and then use those sham evaluation scores as a key factor to justify picking older workers to be discharged. So-called “early professional hires” and recent college graduates were exempt from the Resource Actions.
Bloomberg reports that IBM Vice President of Human Resources Alan Wild admitted at a deposition last summer in an individual lawsuit filed in Texas that IBM laid off as many as 100,000 employees in ”just the last several years” to improve the company’s corporate image to Millennials. Wild said the company wanted to appear “cool” and “trendy” like Amazon and Google rather than an “old fuddy-duddy” organization.
IBM insists the changes in the workforce were about skills, not age, and denies targeting older workers. Indeed, IBM may be completely exonerated by American courts. However, a check of IBM’s main career page Thursday reveals portraits exclusively of young workers and an emphasis on “entry level opportunities.”
Did the 100,000 older workers laid off by IBM experience the extreme stress suffered by French Telecom workers?
What happened to the older IBM workers who allegedly received unfair job performance ratings? What happened when they were were let go? Did they experience the extreme stress suffered by the French Telecom workers? Did some commit suicide or become clinically depressed? It is unlikely that many found equivalent high-paying jobs due to rampant age discrimination in hiring, if they were lucky enough to find any job.
In the French case, former Télécom Chief Executive Officer Didier Lombard told other company officials in 2006 that the employees would either leave “by the window or the door.”
The chief judge in the Télécom case said the French court did not intend to question or criticize the “strategic choices of an entrepreneur” but to make sure the choices were “reasonably” respectful of the law.
The judges found three senior managers guilty, including former CEO Lombard; Louis-Pierre Wenes, ex-director of operations in France; and Olivier Barberot, ex-director of human resources group. They were each sentenced to one year in prison, including eight months suspended sentence, and a fine of approximately $17,000. Four other defendants, executives or former executives of the company were found guilty of complicity and sentenced to four months suspended prison sentence and fine of about $5,000.
The company was ordered to pay a fine of $83,000.
The general secretary of Orange, Nicolas Guérin, announced on the last day of the trial last summer that the company had created a fund to compensate employees for "the suffering" inflicted on them in the so-called restructuring.
