Competition, pressure and harassment:
France's white-collar employees are facing a growing litany of "brutal"
psychological risks in the workplace, according to experts.
Despite
France's labour laws, some of the strongest in the world, depression,
long-term illness, professional burnout and even suicide are becoming
increasingly common among service-sector workers.
Fabienne
Godefroy became severely anorexic, losing 30 kilogrammes (66 pounds),
and developed paranoia after two years of sexual and emotional
harassment at her job in the southwestern city of Toulouse.
She
says constant hounding by her supervisor and his superior, lewd
comments at meetings and obscene anonymous phone calls at home made her
feel like a "hunted animal".
"To want to kill yourself because of work, yes it happens," she said.
The
41-year-old left her job with the Post Office several months ago and is
now kept under close supervision by two psychologists.
Godefroy
is not alone. The impact of stress at work was made brutally clear by a
wave of suicides at French telecoms giant Orange between 2008 and 2009.
In
that period, 35 employees took their lives, some of them in the
workplace itself. Many of them left suicide notes blaming their "terror"
of management and the shock of being shunted from one job to another
with no regard for their skills.
One man jumped off a
bridge after being transferred to a call centre. A 32-year-old woman
threw herself out of an office window just days after a technician tried
to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the stomach during a meeting
when he learnt his job was being scrapped.
The former
boss of France Telecom, Didier Lombard, and the company were charged
with harassment in July 2012 -- a first in France.
This
year alone another 10 employees of the company committed suicide by
March, nearly as many as the whole of 2013, the Observatory for Stress
and Forced Mobility, putting out a "serious alert" about the company.
Observatory
spokesman Pierre Morville blamed Orange's heavy redundancy plan --
30,000 employees out of a total workforce of 100,000, the largest job
cuts from any French company in the past two decades -- for creating an
atmosphere of despair.
"With the advent of hyper competition and market constraints, employees have been destabilised," he said.
"American and Japanese managerial methods have been applied to workers in a somewhat brutal manner."
Employees become tormentors
The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work says the problem is not unique to France.
According
to a study of 31 European countries published last year, stress at work
is seen as a common phenomenon by more than half of employees.
Job insecurity, too much work and harassment were cited as the most common causes for workplace depression.
"The
physical suffering once linked to work has been transformed into a more
intimate form of emotional suffering," said Denis Maillard from the
Technologia advisory group, which specialises in analysing risk in the
workplace.
"Drudgery is now much more psychological
than in the industrial world because of the demand for employees to
engage differently in their work," he added.
Technologia,
which has carried out a hundred studies of French companies in the past
five years, found that workers at France's Post Office and unemployment
agency Pole Emploi are most vulnerable to psychological problems
because of demand for increased productivity.
For
Jean-Claude Delgenes, head of Technologia, problems of bullying and
psychological burnout reflect "an organisation that forgets people and
puts more and more emphasis on pressure and profitability."
Under these conditions, employees "swamped with work, will become tormentors to achieve their goals," he said.
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