Capitalism’s Victims
Increasingly dehumanizing work has caused an epidemic of suicides in France.
by Sarah Waters
Earlier this year, a female manager in her fifties who worked for France’s postal service was found hanging in her office building in Seine-Saint-Denis, just northeast of Paris. Although no suicide note was found, the death has been linked to the company’s announcement two days earlier of “Horizon 2020,” the latest in a series of restructuring plans that will transform the status of workers in the company.
Far from being an isolated incident, the tragedy is part of a suicide epidemic at a whole range of large French companies. One such company is French telecommunications giant, France Télécom (rebranded as Orange in 2013), whose especially acute “suicide waves” have coincided with the privatization and restructuring of the company.
Twelve France Télécom employees took their own life in 2008, nineteen in 2009, twenty-seven in 2010, and six in 2011. Despite a new agreement on workplace conditions negotiated with the trade unions, there has been a renewal of suicides recently with eleven cases in 2013 and ten suicides since the beginning of 2014.
Work-related suicides are an international phenomenon, as evidenced by the spate of suicides at Foxconn’s production sites in southern China in 2010 or the phenomenon of karoshi, or death by overwork, in Japan. Yet France stands apart for the sheer number of work-related suicides, the media coverage of these suicides, and the intense legal and political debates that have followed ...
More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/11/capitalisms-victims/
= new reply since forum marked as read
