This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Staff at the French wine and spirits company Pernod Ricard claim they were under constant pressure to drink at work to the point of damaging their health.

One former salesman told how he felt obliged to knock back up to 12 glasses of the aniseed-flavoured drink a day and drove his car while drunk. Another spoke of three-day binges.

The accusations, denied by Pernod Ricard, come after a member of the firm’s sales team took the company to a labour court in September claiming he had been made ill by excessive drinking.

Since then other employees, one who still works at the company, have come forward to describe a “culture of drinking”.

One saleswoman told Le Parisien how staff drank at lunchtime, after meetings and in the evenings as well as when they met clients, and that continual drinking caused her to suffer hallucinations and hear voices.

“It’s the company’s culture: if you say no, you’re not very well regarded,” she said, adding that she had resorted to tipping glasses of drink into nearby plants.

“People would say, ‘what are you complaining about? You’re being paid to party’.”

When she returned to work after her GP signed her off sick, she said her boss told her: “You’ll have a Ricard? Go on, don’t piss everyone off, you’re not working at Perrier”.

A former colleague added: “The glasses of pastis, swallowed by the dozen at parties, ended up making me sick.”

He said he reported his concerns to bosses after finding a drunk colleague “drooling in his car” and another in an “alcoholic coma”.

“Nobody was shocked,” he told Le Parisien.

Another former member of Pernod Ricard staff told the paper he was nicknamed “Monsieur Ricard”. “We drank so much, I was putting away 12 pastis a day … I could have caused an accident while driving; killed someone or myself.”

Pastis is most often drunk as an apéritif mixed with water. It is popular in France, particularly in the south.

Emmanuel Vouin, a press spokeswoman for Pernod Ricard, which makes €8bn (£6.8bn) a year, denied the accusations, saying drinking was a “personal decision”.

“There is no culture of alcohol, no order, no incitement in any form to drink,” she said. Bruno Gomier, the head of communications for the group, added that staff could decide “not to drink, or drink moderately”.

The tribunal ruling is expected at the end of the month.