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REUTERS
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Didier Lombard had denied his reforms led staff to take their own lives<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n
The ex-boss of France T\u00e9l\u00e9com and two former executives have been jailed over a moral harassment policy linked to suicides among employees in the 2000s.<\/strong><\/p>\n Didier Lombard was jailed for a year, as were Louis-Pierre Wen\u00e8s and Olivier Barberot, although eight months were suspended.<\/p>\n The company, since renamed Orange, was fined \u20ac75,000 ($83,000; \u00a364,000).<\/p>\n The court examined 39 cases of employees, 19 of whom had taken their own lives and 12 who had attempted to.<\/p>\n The others had lived with depression or had been otherwise unable to work.<\/p>\n Four other executives were found guilty of complicity and given four-month suspended sentences and \u20ac5,000 fines.<\/p>\n Lombard, the former president and chief executive officer; Wen\u00e8s, his deputy; and Barberot, the former director of human resources, were also given fines, of \u20ac15,000.<\/p>\n It is the first time that a French court has recognised “institutional harassment”.<\/p>\n The BBC’s Paris correspondent, Hugh Schofield, says the trial has been seen in France as a landmark case for relationships between workers and management.<\/p>\n At the time, the newly privatised company was in the throes of a major reorganisation. Lombard was trying to cut 22,000 jobs and retrain at least 10,000 workers.<\/p>\n Some employees were transferred away from their families or left behind when offices were moved, or assigned demeaning jobs.<\/p>\n “I’ll get them out one way or another, through the window or through the door,” Lombard was quoted as telling senior managers in 2007.<\/p>\n He accepted that the restructuring had upset employees, but rejected the idea that it had led to people taking their own lives.<\/p>\n Among the cases documented:<\/p>\n\n
‘Through the window’<\/h2>\n
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