France Telecom sees 24th employee suicide

Employee morale at France Telecom took another hit yesterday as a 51-year-old worker committed suicide by jumping off a highway overpass during peak morning traffic. The employee, who worked at France Telecom's Annecy call center in the Eastern Haute-Savoie region, said in a suicide note the company's poor treatment of its staff prompted his decision to kill himself. This is the twenty-fourth suicide to happen at France Telecom in the past 18 months. Ongoing job cuts likely have contributed to the low employee morale and the raft of suicides. Between 2006 to 2008, France Telecom dismissed 22,000 employees.

Patrice Diochet, a local union leader, told the Agence France-Press that the worker who came over from an after-sales unit to the Annecy call center was apparently labeled as "emotionally fragile."

"It's shameful. He worked in a service long known to be unbearable," Diochet told Agence France-Press. "There was a real indifference, no humanity, all they talked about was numbers and workers were treated like sausage meat. We thought management would have learned a lesson."

For more:
- XChange via Associated Press has this article [1]

Related article
France Telecom: labor minister to discuss employee suicides [2]