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More worker suicides reported at France Telecom

10 September 2010 17:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Five employees of France Telecom (FT) have committed suicide in the past 10 days, a union official said, rekindling memories of a spate of suicides that rocked the company last year, APA reports quoting â€œReutersâ€.
The official said 23 FT employees had now killed themselves this year, compared with 19 in 2009. The rate this year is slightly ahead of the French average of 17 suicides per 100,000 people in 2006, according to World Health Organization figures. France Telecom has 181,000 employees, with 100,000 in France.
"There have been five suicides at France Telecom in the past 10 days, committed outside the workplace," said Sebastien Crozier of the CFE-CGC/UNSA union.
Chief Executive Stephane Richard took over the helm of Europe’s third largest telecom operator in March after his predecessor was seen as mishandling the suicide crisis.
Richard has created more counseling and surveillance programs to try to prevent such incidents.
His five-year strategic plan presented in July also contained a raft of measures to improve worker morale.
The company, which is still 27 percent-owned by the French state, has been struggling to shed its public service legacy and adopt a more profit-oriented attitude, which has led to staff cuts and longer working hours.
A spokesman for the telecom operator confirmed that some employees had taken their own lives but declined to say how many.
"It is with sadness that we learned that several employees have committed suicide," he said.
"These staffers, who did not know each other and did not have any links between them, worked in different fields in different regions of France."
He added: " At this stage, we can establish no correlation between these troubling incidents. But we will examine each one to try to determine what happened. Naturally the company will do everything it can to support the families and colleagues of the people concerned."