Suicide 'Fad' at French Telecom.

In the past 19 months, 24 workers have committed suicide.

Management have fobbed it off as a fad, or a quirk of statistics - they have said many things but they have not admitted that in an attempt to drive profits they have created a Papillon* inspired version of hell on earth in their call centres.  Here's how the inmates describes life in that awful place.

"Everything the employee does is counted: when he or she goes to the toilet; when he eats; when he smokes a cigarette. The workers are even made to wear wi-fi ear and mouth pieces so they can deal with calls during their breaks."

"The workers were treated like cattle. When they failed to meet their targets, they were punished or screamed at."

"My job is to sell more and more stuff, new services, to clients who ring up with some kind of problem. I am supposed to be obsessed with making more and more money on commission."

Raised eyebrows in the UK and the USA.  Isn't that the way call centres have to be run?  Isn't it just a fact of life?  Perhaps the French just aren't used to modern management.  They've been spoiled all these years perhaps and can't adjust.

I hope my readers will see immediately that good customer service and sustained growth are not the results of such amazing management stupidity and that the reason we hate call centres is because they are designed to be staffed by discontented employees who cannot help but give us bad service.  It's all in the design of the work and management is responsible for that.

Sadly, poor service and employee's dissatisfaction ultimately come back to management via those same old culprits Targets and Bonuses, but I'm not so sure we can so easily pin the responsibility for the French Telecom suicide rate which is comparable with the French national average and may actually not be getting any better or any worse but simply demonstrating random variation.

I'm not going to look into it any more than that in case it depresses me.

* Note: I'm referring of course to the Henri Charrière book and the 1973 film and not to any similarly named call centre technology provider.

From The Independent