France Télécom Bosses to Hold Crisis Talks Over Staff Suicides

The French government will hold a crisis meeting with the boss of France Télécom today as concern mounts over a spate of suicides among staff which unions have blamed on workplace stress.

Didier Lombard, the chief executive of the telecommunications giant, was summoned by Xavier Darcos, the labor minister, after the number of employees to have taken their own lives in the past 18 months reached 23.

Demands for the government, which is France Telecom's largest shareholder, to intervene in the affair became increasingly pressing yesterday after news emerged of another attempted suicide in which a customer services manager in the eastern city of Metz was found unconscious in her office. Union officials said she had taken barbiturates during her lunch break.

Reacting to the incident, which came just three days after a 32-year-old woman threw herself out of her fourth-floor office window in northwestern Paris, a spokesman for France Telecom said the latest examples were possible indications of a copy-cat syndrome.

"Unfortunately what we feared the most is happening: a [suicide] contagion. Our absolute priority is to do everything to halt this vicious circle," he told Reuters.

Until recently the company, Europe's third largest mobile phone operator and biggest provider of broadband had insisted that the rate of suicide among its 100,000-strong staff was not out of the ordinary for a business of its size.

It batted off accusations from union leaders that the deaths were linked to the widespread lay-offs, transferrals and restructuring put in place as a means of minimizing the effect of the economic downturn.

But the latest tragedies, which unions say have brought to 23 the number of staff to have killed themselves since the beginning of 2008, have prompted bosses to resort to emergency steps. Budget minister Eric Woerth described the suicide rate as 'incredible'.

Yesterday, senior executives held conference calls with 500 of the business's top managers to try to reassure an increasingly shell-shocked workforce and implement urgent measures designed to prevent any more suicides. Hundreds of planned job transfers have been suspended.

"There will be a clear message to all the managers to quickly organize local team meetings to explain what happened and what's being done, and to make sure that if there are problems they can be discussed," said a spokesman, Sebastien Audra.

Seventy office doctors have also been told to keep an eye out for any member of staff showing signs of depression or anxiety which may place them at higher risk.

But one of them, Monique Fraysse-Guiglini, said that the sudden mobilization was too little, too late. "[The management] has been in total denial for a long time. It has refused to listen to what the office doctors had to say about the restructuring," she told Libération newspaper. "We tried to sound the alarm several times, in vain. Speech is very restricted."