24th suicide in 18 months at France telecom.

This would be great altered very slightly to be a news article. You can click edit and change content type to "news" to do this if you want... I remember you wrote up a couple of the stories about the Renault suicides a couple of years ago. Very sad.

Cool, cheers!

Call centres with targets to hit. Feel sorry for our froggy friends.

On this subject, here is a quick, rough translation (mine) from the ICC’s French publication, Revolution Internationale, October, 2009. I have omitted the footnotes and references.

‘The inhuman expression of capitalist exploitation

Twenty-three (plus 13 attempted) suicides in eighteen months at France Telecom! Here’s a new, tragic witness of the fact that proletarians are more and more confronted by a climate of terror and insupportable terror at work. For the MD of the firm, Didier Lombard, rejecting any blame of victims of a ferocious exploitation, it’s just a question of a simple effect of “mood” which only affects “fragile people”. What cynicism!
For this unscrupulous capitalist boss, whose mea culpa is only a simple imperative of communications, the tragedy doesn’t reside in the fact that human beings find themselves pounded by the implacable logic of profitability of capital, but in the discredit which affects the image of his business!
Faced with this development dictated by the laws of the “cash till”, a number of politicians, notably on the left, make a show of emotion. These are the same hypocrites who have favoured massive redundancies in this firm throughout twenty years, thus contributing to accelerating the infernal speed-ups leading to the drama of today. These are the same socialists who have multiplied stress through the introduction of the 35-hour week, including a flexibility making the worker forced and fatigued. The same politicians who brought France Telecom into the stock-exchange in 1997 with management methods that we know today! At the time, it was no-one other than Jospin, who proclaimed with pride, that the “change of the enterprise was a great success!” Elsewhere a France Telecom manager gives us a good idea of this “great success”: “My job is to make cuts of 5% every six months. As much as you say it has been achieved, the question is knowing if one can cut an arm or a leg”. To make these type of objectives palatable after this wave of suicides, it’s not surprising that they are looking at more subtle ways of delivering the blows: in the sense of giving a “green number” for a supplementary control of the workers and management spreading out the effects at this firm. But basically nothing will change: it’s quite clear that the objective of capital will always be profitability and more pressure still on the workers, up to their physiological and psychological limits. This is the dynamic and capitalism can only be about the exhaustion of the labour force. Today, it’s not only the shop floor workers who are being squeezed like lemons, but also the engineers, the administrative and commercial sections that the crisis and extreme competition have proletarianised and whose conditions of work are equally degraded. Already, at the dawn of its development, to assure its profit, Marx wrote in Capital: “capitalist production, which is essentially production of surplus-value, absorbing extra work (...) imposes the deterioration of the work force of men by depriving them of their normal conditions of functioning and development, physical as moral, producing the exhaustion and early death of this workforce". Today, it is the intensification of the conditions of work which pushes to this exhaustion.
The phenomenon of suicides is unfortunately not new, nor limited to France. The wave of suicides at work follows a growing and continual increase, even if it’s deliberately unquantified. Since the 90s, the number of suicides has been aggravated by the violence and brutality of the economic crisis. It shows the fact that the capitalist world has no future, no perspective other than to generate social misery, barbarity and death. Throughout Europe and the world, the stress of work continues to cause havoc. In the US, the minister of labour announced that: “the number of suicides at work has risen 28% for 2008. In all, 251 have been noted, the highest number since 1992”. In China they’ve multiplied with factory closures. In France 2007, there was some publicity around suicides at Technicentre of Renault, PSA, EDF-GDF (Chinon), in the banks, Sodexho....
Nothing has changed, if anything it’s worse. The pressure and the harassment of the bosses, the fear of unemployment and the blackmail of systematic redundancies, the price of growing overwork is invoked. The phenomenon of exhaustion at work, “burn out” tends to develop at an unprecedented scale. What’s called “moral harassment” is becoming the rule, a strategic given destined to adapt workers to sudden change or to straightaway get rid of “undesirable” workers or those that are insufficiently productive at the least cost. “Specialists” exist for this purpose of harassment, what’s called “Cleaners” or “transition managers”. They are paid well for this dirty work: destroy the personality of those who are labelled “ineffective” or “unadaptive”, isolate the militant workers, push them into error or towards the door, often the oldest, and at the cheapest cost. There’s a double objective:
- push those out that can’t stand it at the least cost;
- demoralise and intimidate the others who stay and render them more docile and malleable.
However, the conditions of exploitation and the pursuance of attacks linked to the never-ending economic crisis will, in time, push anger and the collective struggle, solidarity and consciousness forward and deeper. The future is not competition between proletarians, but their growing union against exploitation. It’s this future that gives hope, preparing for massive and unified struggle and, in time, the revolutionary perspective.

WH. 18.9.09’

This article appears above another that details the repression of workers at the shut down Continental factory at Clarioix, where of the 1120 workers made redundant some months ago, only about 15 have found jobs. Following the ransacking by a few workers of the sub-prefecture of the district, an act of desperation and isolation encouraged in no small part by the CGT union, 6 workers were sentenced between 3 and 5 months in prison, with remission and possible fines of between 48,000 and 120,000 euros. The article notes the difference in how fishermen and farmers are treated for example and sees it as an expression of the repression of the state and a warning to all workers.

At that rate they might even stop jumping after the first two hundred or so.

~J.

So given that it's all pretty ambiguous, we'd better just lie and not cite any sources, on the grounds that not knowing the facts is going to be really useful for struggling workers.

~J.

What’s your problem Biglittlej? Why, in a sneaky way do you accuse me of lying? Of ignoring facts that are really useful for the class struggle? Why do you feel the need to attack me on this issue?

A constructive post by Allybaba, with one of the first quotes from Hazard talking about how difficult it is to get unambiguous figures, and how many workplace deaths are not recorded as such.
To get figures of workers, or their families, who kill themselves as a direct result of unemployment for example must be even more difficult and what figures there are from government agencies must be highly suspect (just because there are some figures doesn’t make them, as Big seems to think, ‘really useful for the class struggle’). In fact they can be very misleading and worse than useless for the class struggle. The HSE figures on workplace related cancers are a case in point. Workplace acquired cancers are many times than the HSE’s figures, a real scandal and this is when work-related cancers aren’t put down to smoking, etc. By all means, get what figures you can from the bourgeoisie, but make it clear when they are suspect, as are all the bourgeoisie’s figures for work-related suicides, “accidents” and disease.
And while you’re doing this Big, don’t forget about the deteriorating conditions of the working class at work and the massive attacks that are raining down on them

To seriously be “really useful for struggling workers”, then communist intervention is better off directing its attacks against the lies of the ruling class than slandering an expression of the working class. The only thing I agree with Big about here is that the working class as a whole is not riveted by this exchange – but that’s not really the point is it? The “facts” as Big puts it, are mostly the bourgeoisie’s facts and while some useful indications can be gleaned from some of these, they are vey obviously skewed or presented to express a class position.

I repeat, that the Hazard web-site referred to by Allybaba, says that hundreds of work-related suicides are not recorded as such year on year. I made the same point about deaths, suicides, etc., directly relating to unemployment. Many work-related suicides are not recorded as such and nor are unemployment-related suicides and deaths. There are absolutely no reliable figures from the bourgeoisie on these and even if they have them, which I doubt, they are not releasing them as such.
More on the bourgeoisie’s figures from another “lying” publication of the ICC: “The HSE gives a figure of 241 workers killed in the UK 2006/7. The Hazards Campaign estimates between 1600 and 1700 killed each year with up to 50,000 dying from work-related illnesses. In 2007 a report prepared by the HSE "on the burden of occupational cancer in Britain", looking at six types of cancer, attributed over 6000 deaths of men and over 1000 deaths of women in 2004 to workplace environments, i.e., 4.9% of all cancer deaths. Researchers at Stirling University condemned the figures, putting the real cost of work related cancer each year of up to 24 thousand and accused the HSE of "failing to acknowledge or deal effectively with an epidemic of work-related cancers". Respiratory and heart figures can be added to these, without mentioning stress, neurotoxicity, Parkinson's, auto-immune diseases, asthma and the list goes on that the HSE doesn't take full account of. These cancers particularly, occurred in many industries from construction to manufacture, retail, transport, teaching, restaurants, hospitals, offices and hotels. Like the HSE, the Labour Force Survey ignores many illnesses and diseases to arrive at its figure of 2.2 million workers made ill each year by work.