Interview by Sarah Waters

Earlier this year, a female manager in her fifties who worked for France’s postal service was found hanging in her office building in Seine-Saint-Denis, just northeast of Paris. Although no suicide note was found, the death has been linked to the company’s announcement two days earlier of “Horizon 2020,” the latest in a series of restructuring plans that will transform the status of workers in the company.

Far from being an isolated incident, the tragedy is part of a suicide epidemic at a whole range of large French companies. One such company is French telecommunications giant, France Télécom (rebranded as Orange in 2013), whose especially acute “suicide waves” have coincided with the privatization and restructuring of the company.

Twelve France Télécom employees took their own life in 2008, nineteen in 2009, twenty-seven in 2010, and six in 2011. Despite a new agreement on workplace conditions negotiated with the trade unions, there has been a renewal of suicides recently with eleven cases in 2013 and ten suicides since the beginning of 2014.

Work-related suicides are an international phenomenon, as evidenced by the spate of suicides at Foxconn’s production sites in southern China in 2010 or the phenomenon of karoshi, or death by overwork, in Japan. Yet France stands apart for the sheer number of work-related suicides, the media coverage of these suicides, and the intense legal and political debates that have followed. (With a suicide rate of 14.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, France also has one of the highest rates of suicide in Europe and one that is double that of the UK and three times that of Spain and Italy.)

The connection between an act of suicide and workplace conditions is extremely difficult to establish and is often an outcome of lengthy legal proceedings taken by the family of a victim against a company. But at France Télécom, some individuals left letters that were published in the French press that explicitly blamed their work. Bosses reacted by trying to individualize the causes of suicide, attributing it to a mental or emotional flaw in the person and disassociating it from any links to the workplace.

Critical to the recognition of workplace suicides as a social phenomenon in France has been the role of a new syndicalist structure created in 2007, the Observatory of Stress and Forced Mobility (L’Observatoire du stress et des mobilités forcées). In the face of intense hostility by company bosses and mainstream trade unions, the Observatory succeeded in bringing suicides to public attention, attracting widespread media coverage and pursuing France Télécom bosses before the courts.

Sarah Waters recently spoke with Patrick Ackermann, trade union leader within the leftist Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques (SUD) and one of the founders of the Observatory.