Moral harassment causes 35 suicides. Really?

Maybe this will help you rustle people's jimmies.

(1) Countries' legal systems should be able to punish those responsible for working conditions that provably and significantly impede health.

(2) Working conditions that provably and significantly contribute to death and sickness impede health. (1, consequence)

(3) There are many independent reports of working conditions at Orange significantly contributing to deaths and sickness and they should be trusted and treated as evidence. (Premise)

(4a) It is reasonable to believe that working conditions at Orange contributed significantly to deaths and sickness. (3, using the evidence).

(4b) It is unreasonable to believe that working conditions at Orange did not contribute significantly to deaths and sickness (3, using the evidence).

(5) France's legal system should be able to punish those responsible at Orange for the working conditions at their company as they provably and significantly impeded health.

Reply to frank They were convicted of harrassing people. Which they did. They were not convicted of causing the suicides. Which would then be some kind of homocide. They were truly terrible people doing things no employer should do with the intent they had. As an employer you have a lot of control of people for a significant part of their week. In a great economy, they can just hop somewhere else. You're responsible if they take their lives, but you are responsible for abusing the position to make people feel like shit and that was their goal. Make people feel like shit, so they quit.

Quoting fdrake

(1) Countries' legal systems should be able to punish those responsible for working conditions that provably and significantly impede health.

The rightist wonders about that, though.

It sounds like the French job market was such that miserable people at Orange didn't think they could quit and work elsewhere, so they remained in their positions until the darkness overtook them.

The fact that the job market was tight indicates that France is overpopulated and some portion of the workers need to move to where there are jobs. By forcing French companies to maintain happy work environments, they're effectively making the problem worse. French people will stay in France and produce more French people into an overloaded system. Companies will struggle to maintain the happiness quotient until they finally go out of business and the crowds of hungry French people will start executing people by guillotine.

Thus the heroic efforts to create happiness have the potential to produce disaster.

It's better to work with nature and allow small adjustments (which might include 35 suicides), rather than prop up an artificial system that will eventually fail in a larger bloody adjustment.

Quoting frank

The fact that the job market was tight indicates that France is overpopulated and some portion of the workers need to move to where there are jobs. By forcing French companies to maintain happy work environments, they're effectively making the problem worse. French people will stay in France and produce more French people into an overloaded system. Companies will struggle to maintain the happiness quotient until they finally go out of business and the crowds of hungry French people will start executing people by guillotine.

Are you arguing that it is necessary for people to be harassed into suicide in every workplace because if it doesn't happen civilisation will collapse quicker?

Quoting fdrake

Are you arguing that it is necessary for people to be harassed into suicide in every workplace because if it doesn't happen civilisation will collapse quicker?

No, I'm not. The rightist argues that survival of the fittest generates healthy entities in human industry in very much the same way it does in the evolution of organisms.

There is no depth of depravity to which the economy will not descend with enthusiasm if a profit can be made.

Quoting unenlightened

There is no depth of depravity to which the economy will not descend with enthusiasm if a profit can be made.

:100:

Quoting frank

Isnt it each person's responsibility to maintain his or her own sanity?

Does that have no limitations? If someone binds you to a table and has water drip on your forehead for ten years straight, is it still your own responsibility to maintain sanity? If someone secretly administers psychosis-inducing drugs to your system, is it your responsibility?

If the material conditions of the workers did not allow them or make them feel they were allowed to rebel or change their circumstances, how much can be said to be their own responsibility?

Quoting frank

The rightist argues that survival of the fittest generates healthy entities

Who survives in these scenarios? The callous and psychopathic? I would not classify them as "healthy."

Quoting frank

Isnt it each person's responsibility to maintain his or her own sanity?

Sure, and for being abuse of power jerks they can take responsibility for their santiy and experiences in prison for a short time, and then likely go back to priviledged lives, where they perhaps will just be bad bosses but not sadistic ones.

Reply to frank Were all the Civilized Nations (sic) to apply the French law to their various corporate and/or state employers and then resort to the guillotine, a new large corporation would be needed to design, build, deliver, and maintain all the beheading equipment--sharpening blades, cleaning up the copious blood spatter, making sure that Occupational Safety and Health rules were followed, etc.

There is a reason why we get paid for coming into work every day: we sure as hell wouldn't do it for free.

There is something about the world-wide dominant paradigm of management - worker relations that so easily begins the slide down the slippery slope towards dehumanization, alienation, anomie, etc, and I bet France is a relatively good place to work, by and large. And maybe the workers at this spoiled Orange French Telecom should have practiced more la solidarité and la résistance, oui?

Moral responsibility works both ways -- offense and defense. A better cure than small fines and short jail sentences (which are under appeal and might be dismissed) is strong united worker power.

Reply to frank

The idea that someone else is to blame for someone else’s suicide is not without its irony. There is no place in the workplace for bullying and harassment, but then again it was completely within their power to quit and leave those conditions behind them.

Quoting frank

No, I'm not. The rightist argues that survival of the fittest generates healthy entities in human industry in very much the same way it does in the evolution of organisms.

Can you spell out for me how that relates to workplace conditions that lead to unhealthy workers - exposed to conditions that are not necessary for the good functioning of an office?

Quoting Coben

You're responsible if they take their lives, but you are responsible for abusing the position to make people feel like shit and that was their goal.

Why didn't they just lay them off?

Quoting Bitter Crank

Moral responsibility works both ways -- offense and defense. A better cure than small fines and short jail sentences (which are under appeal and might be dismissed) is strong united worker power.

I once heard that when workers unionize, they just get two asshole bosses instead of one since unionizers tend to be belligerent buttheads. But at least with a union there would have been a way for those 35 people to have their voices heard.

Quoting Artemis

The rightist argues that survival of the fittest generates healthy entities
— frank

Who survives in these scenarios? The callous and psychopathic? I would not classify them as "healthy."

I was thinking more about the survival of a French company that attacks its employees instead of facilitating enthusiasm. How has it survived this long?

Quoting fdrake

Can you spell out for me how that relates to workplace conditions that lead to unhealthy workers - exposed to conditions that are not necessary for the good functioning of an office?

On reflection, my point was a weird one to be making. The French should punish whoever they want to.

Iago didn't make Othello into a murderer. Othello did that. Iago is tortured to death at the end, though. The crime of the French executives is similar to Iago's. Intellectually, it's hard to pinpoint it, but it's very clear emotionally. We're supposed to help each other.

Quoting NOS4A2

The idea that someone else is to blame for someone else’s suicide is not without its irony. There is no place in the workplace for bullying and harassment, but then again it was completely within their power to quit and leave those conditions behind them.

Yep.

Quoting frank

Why didn't they just lay them off?

Because laying them off would have required severance payouts. It was more economical to terrorize their employees into leaving than offering them redundancy.

Quoting frank

It's better to work with nature and allow small adjustments (which might include 35 suicides), rather than prop up an artificial system that will eventually fail in a larger bloody adjustment.

That is an exceedingly callous thing to say.

You shouldn’t underestimate how hard it is to leave a salaried position in a large company. It’s easy to say ‘well, just find another job’ but it’s often extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. Mortgages, school fees, car repayments and everything else comes out of that monthly paycheck and often an employee has spent years working up to a position. When you interview for jobs, one leading question is always ‘why did you leave your last job.’ And one piece of regular interview advice is ‘never run down or badmouth your previous employer, it will make you appear disloyal and untrustworthy.’ So, if you quit one of those roles, it’s metaphorically like being out on the street. Hence the ‘stickiness’ of such positions.

Quoting frank

Intellectually, it's hard to pinpoint it, but it's very clear emotionally. We're supposed to help each other.

If you need a structural argument for why workplace safety should have laws attached, consider that sickness has huge social costs; it decreases workplace productivity and requires the use of social safety nets to care for those that are sick. In essence, workplaces harassing employees offloads the costs the business would have for dealing with the issue adequately onto whatever measures there are in their employees' social safety nets, the business loses productivity from the harassed workers, and the harassed employees' social relationships suffer too.

There are cases where workplaces stand to gain, or avoid loss, by harassing their employees or having an unsafe working environment (like with Orange), and in doing so their interests go against the public and the state. It makes sense to punish workplace harassment and unsafe working environments to impede the social and financial costs of this negligence from being offloaded onto the public and the state.

Quoting fdrake

If you need a structural argument for why workplace safety should have laws attached, consider that sickness has huge social costs; it decreases workplace productivity and requires the use of social safety nets to care for those that are sick.

And that argument is pretty easy to understand if we're talking about chemical exposure or the absence of safety equipment on machinery.

It's a little harder see how to apply that in the case of psychological abuse because while asbestos has pretty much the same effect on everyone, moral harassment doesn't. Some people thrive on an emotionally charged environment that includes permission to be abusive (which is provided by an abusive executive.) And in regard to the suicides, the clearest sign of toxicity, it would be hard to prove that workplace stress was the only cause in each case, in fact that would be a little odd. Again, with asbestos, the chest x-ray gives you a diagnosis that can't be questioned.

Quoting fdrake

It makes sense to punish workplace harassment and unsafe working environments to impede the social and financial costs of this negligence from being offloaded onto the public and the state.

With moral harassment, it will be hard to quantify that cost. Less hard to quantify will be the revenues the government will lose for lack of companies like Uber in the economy, a company known for both ruthlessness and profitability.

Quoting Wayfarer

It's better to work with nature and allow small adjustments (which might include 35 suicides), rather than prop up an artificial system that will eventually fail in a larger bloody adjustment.
— frank

That is an exceedingly callous thing to say.

You shouldn’t underestimate how hard it is to leave a salaried position in a large company.

I know it was callous. It also happens to be true. That said, I'd rather be in a society that reaches out with compassion to people who are in pain than one that sees them as superfluous (even though we probably all are.)

Quoting frank

And that argument is pretty easy to understand if we're talking about chemical exposure or the absence of safety equipment on machinery.

Whatever causes the sickness and death doesn't really matter, does it? It just changes what should be done to address the issue, and the laws which may apply. Widespread workplace harassment and mental illness inducing work environments give business globally 1 trillion dollars in losses from productivity decrease alone, never mind the social costs and the weight that brings on social safety nets.

Quoting frank

Some people thrive on an emotionally charged environment that includes permission to be abusive (which is provided by an abusive executive.)

There's a big difference between a high pressure work environment and an abusive one. High pressure work environments can still have clear goals, efficient allocation of talent to tasks, and provide employees with downtime or appropriate compensation. The case with Orange wilfully stopped good management practices for the sole purpose of driving out employees they did not want to pay any more or provide a severance package for.

Quoting frank

With moral harassment, it will be hard to quantify that cost. Less hard to quantify will be the revenues the government will lose for lack of companies like Uber in the economy, a company known for both ruthlessness and profitability.

The WHO keeps statistics on it. It has the benefit of book-keeping on its side, whereas the reasons Orange treated their workers like they did was much more to do with, well, downsizing to avoid paying people (get those outflows off the books by any means necessary) and forcing them out without a severance package.

If it wasn't so clear cut that Orange's management practices caused the suicide of some of their workers, it wouldn't've been proved beyond reasonable doubt would it?

Edit: An unstated assumption in what you're saying is that such abuses actually produce efficiency gains or mitigate efficiency losses, which remains unargued for, and is implausible given the obvious effects of illness promoting environments on productivity and the costs they impose on societies.

Reply to frankPresumably they did not have just cause in whatever government or employment or union related contracts. Obviously they would have done that if they could have. That would have saved them labor. To harrass people took management hours that could have been spent on other things.

Quoting frank

Some people thrive on an emotionally charged environment that includes permission to be abusive

You mean like sadistic serial killers might?

A person's enjoyment of being a bully does not make a right.

Quoting fdrake

Whatever causes the sickness and death doesn't really matter, does it?

In the case of depression and anxiety disorders the cause is likely to be genetic. You can't have a genetic predisposition to having your head ripped off in a combine accident, so agricultural accidents can be easily traced to a lack of safety precautions. Psychological disorders can't be.

The world is full of assholes. Sooner or later we all have to learn how to deal with that. An asshole boss is an opportunity to either learn how to deal with abuse or grow a spine stiff enough to get yourself out of the situation.

Quoting fdrake

Widespread workplace harassment and mental illness inducing work environments give business globally 1 trillion dollars in losses from productivity decrease alone

Source?

Quoting fdrake

The case with Orange wilfully stopped good management practices for the sole purpose of driving out employees they did not want to pay any more or provide a severance package for.

Has France started legally mandating good management practices?

Quoting fdrake

Edit: An unstated assumption in what you're saying is that such abuses actually produce efficiency gains or mitigate efficiency losses, which remains unargued for,

I just pointed out that an abusive environment can produce efficiency gains. It's called bootcamp. It's you who wants to make the positive claim that abusive workplaces create costs for society in general. I'm not seeing it. As BC pointed out, every job has a downside. You get paid to put up with it.

The best case (and questionably realistic) scenario for allowing abusive work environments of the sort described is that company X makes more profits. That doesn't seem a very compelling reason to sanction lives being destroyed unless you deify commercial success to balance the equation. Which I suppose many rightists do. Mix that with a bit of social Darwinism and corporate psychopathy and soon you're at "Fuck the lambs, we need more Doner kebab!". Not much of a crowd pleaser this side of the pond.

Reply to frank

It's a choice. As a society we choose what we will put up with. Why should potential "efficiency gains" outweigh every other consideration? You could get efficiency gains by forcing kids to work, extending the working week to 60 hours, abolishing retirement. That would toughen us all up too. The question is why would we want that?

Quoting Artemis

Some people thrive on an emotionally charged environment that includes permission to be abusive
— frank

You mean like sadistic serial killers might?

A person's enjoyment of being a bully does not make a right.

We weren't talking about whether or not it's right. We were talking about whether it costs the taxpayers money. But since you brought it up, why would you say that being an asshole is wrong?

Quoting Baden

"Fuck the lambs, we need more Doner kebab!". Not much of a crowd pleaser this side of the pond.

France is on your side of the pond, Baden.

Reply to frank

Makes my point. "French Telecom Company Convicted Of 'Moral Harassment". And you won't hear much argument against that over here. Seems self-evident its undesirable practice.

Quoting Baden

Makes my point. "French Telecom Company Convicted Of 'Moral Harassment". And you won't hear much argument against that over here. Seems self-evident its undesirable practice.

Cool.

I only glanced at an article about this so i might be wrong, but didn't orange execs intentionally try to make people's lives and working conditions miserable with the specific intention of having them quit?

They were trying to speed up employee departures (probably because firing or laying off costs more money).

So should companies be allowed to harass their employees into quitting in order to save on severance fees?

Quoting VagabondSpectre

So should companies be allowed to harass their employees into quitting in order to save on severance fees?

The primary targets were probably older retired-in-place types. Young workers cost less and they work harder.

A company that does that has a poor relationship with the community.

Quoting frank

The primary targets were probably older retired-in-place types. Young workers cost less and they work harder.

A company that does that has a poor relationship with the community.

Are you suggesting that the market should sort this out?

What if some disgruntled employees harassed the execs to the point that one of them commits suicide?

I'm pretty sure this is just a case of a corporation trying to steal money from people who have no way to fight back. If they want retired-in-place old folks out the door, then they need to pay the severance fees (or to take the stock hit from issuing layoffs, or whatever the fiscal reason for this was).

What the execs did was a criminal betrayal, and it should be corrected by both market forces AND punitive measures (although it looks like they got relative wrist slaps).

Quoting VagabondSpectre

What the execs did was a criminal betrayal,

Betrayal of what exactly?

Quoting frank

Betrayal of what exactly?

It's a betrayal of the employer-employee relationship/contract.

When someone agrees to work for a company, there is an unspoken assumption that the employer won't begin harassing the new employee to death the moment it becomes financially beneficial to do so.

P.S: in terms of laws, there are all kinds of harassment statutes, a number of which specifically apply to working conditions and treatment of employees. That's what makes it criminal.

Reply to VagabondSpectre

I'd call that a basic duty of care. Luckily, it usually tends to gel well with the profit motive as workplace suicides tend to be bad for business.

This part of the the article says it all:

The roots of the case date back about two decades, to a period when the company, then known by the name France Télécom, was still part of the government's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Once a state-run monopoly, the company sold off most of its shares and underwent a process of privatization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

That process left its employees in an uncomfortable situation: still enjoying the strong employment protections of civil servants, but working for a management structure newly constrained by the marketplace and looking to shed costs to compete.

Civil servants cannot be fired the same way as ordinary employees. That's the problem.

Companies and corporations are just these bullshit contracts how we make otherwise normal transactions of services to be these awful employer/employee relations.

Quoting ssu

Civil servants cannot be fired the same way as ordinary employees. That's the problem.

I knew it! Socialism was the problem! :strong:

Quoting VagabondSpectre

When someone agrees to work for a company, there is an unspoken assumption that the employer won't begin harassing the new employee to death the moment it becomes financially beneficial to do so.

I think you just made that up.

Quoting VagabondSpectre

P.S: in terms of laws, there are all kinds of harassment statutes, a number of which specifically apply to working conditions and treatment of employees. That's what makes it criminal.

Could you give an example?

Quoting Baden

I'd call that a basic duty of care. Luckily, it usually tends to gel well with the profit motive as workplace suicides tend to be bad for business.

"Duty of care" certainly applies in the employer-employee relationship. However, in tort law, duty of care pertains to "negligence" suits, but the actions of the execs were intentional. Breach of duty of care is when someone fails to do the reasonable minimum due to negligence, but an intentional tort (the intentional and unjustified causing of harm to another) is something else entirely (harsher punishments in many cases, up to and including punitive damages). Intentional torts require no breach of duty of care because we all have the implicit duty not to intentionally take actions that are reasonably likely to cause harm to others (they're harder to prove though,because we demonstrate intent instead of duty of care and a breach thereof (negligence).

That said, duty of care has probably been breached...

@frank with regard to tort law, see the above (they're guilty of intentional torts, and I expect the families/estates of the victims to sue for damages). If I was litigating for a plaintiff in a civil suit against the execs (not a lawyer, so that would be funny...), I would show the intentional tort of inflicting emotional/mental distress (and the harm caused being suicides), and seek extraordinary punitive damages.

With regard to criminal law, they were already sentenced right? "Moral harassment?" (these kinds of laws vary from state to state and nation to nation). Depending on what the execs actually did (when and how) the company could be liable for an unsafe work environment (OSHA laws), or the individuals could be found guilty of criminal harassment of some kind.

Quoting frank

I think you just made that up.

They're called occupational safety and health administration laws (OSHA standards)

https://employment.findlaw.com/workplace-safety/workplace-safety-osha-and-osh-act-overview.html

You are aware that there are laws regulating what employers can and cannot do to their employees right?

Reply to VagabondSpectre

:point: :up:

Reply to VagabondSpectre I know what OSHA is. A boss can turn a workplace into hell without any overt bullying. Where that exists, we don't need to refer to "moral harassment." If it's assault, call it assault.

I think we both need to know what these French execs actually did.

Reply to frank I did read that they essentially terrorized the employees by moving them around into new roles they were unsuited for, and setting unrealistic productivity objectives. In some situations, there would be no plausible case against the employer because they can claim it is a part of their management strategy, but apparently there is evidence showing that they took those actions specifically to distress their employees into quitting.

The idea of a social contract is pretty useful here (I think some conceptions of tort law frame it as a formalized social contract). Because we're inexorably forced into living and working together, we have to erect limitations against harmful and deceptive practices that spread harm, (lest we all burn in a fireball of our own greed, envy, and retribution). Corporations and business entities should not be exempt from those necessary limitations (ethically speaking), lest we degenerate into being wholly owned by them with the gold, and without scruples.

Quoting VagabondSpectre

The idea of a social contract is pretty useful here

I'm thinking something more primitive: the ideal is that we support each other (and seek to bring out the best).

Where that doesn't happen, the stress can be the sand in the oyster or it can kill the oyster. It's hard to say how we should hold the sand responsible either way.

Reply to frank But when the sand-man intentionally tries to over-sand and damage some oysters into retreat to save on dismissal costs or other obstacles, then we have a harmful sand-man who is breaching the ideal that we should seek to support and bring out the best in each-other.

These execs seem to have done the exact opposite. They sought to stress and debilitate their employees in order to bring out the worst in them.

It's that malice of intent, and the harm that resulted, that generates the strongest ethical and legal issue.

Quoting Baden

You could get efficiency gains by [...] extending the working week to 60 hours

Actually from what I've read, the longer the shift the lower the efficiency (work per time).

I would expect that in many cases, overall efficiency of production coincides with worker well-being, because healthy, happy people do better work, and poorer people spend more of their income so paying more to the poor and working classes instead of the upper classes means more demand and higher profits for businesses, and so on. The people on top treating the people on bottom poorly is irrational behavior that fails to look at what a detriment it makes in the big picture, because being rich and powerful doesn't necessarily mean you're a smart, systemic, forward-thinker.

Quoting VagabondSpectre

It's that malice of intent, and the harm that resulted, that generates the strongest ethical and legal issue.

I agree that knowing someone is deliberately trying to make you feel like crap adds a little more oomph to the punch. There's shock value.

But that's not too hard to hide from onlookers. I wonder how the French court went about weighing the evidence.

Quoting frank

But that's not too hard to hide from onlookers. I wonder how the French court went about weighing the evidence.

I remember reading a quote that I believe was used as evidence to show intent. it went something like "Whether by the window or the door, I'll get them out by any means necessary". Mens Rea (guilty mind) is notoriously difficult to prove in many situations, but not when we have a confession establishing it. Given the severity of the harm that resulted, and the clear evidence of intent, it would actually be a pretty strong case in a civil suit. The defense would likely try to argue that their clients could not have reasonably known that their actions would result in suicides, but that defense would be assailable in many ways (namely the fact that over 30 employees killed themselves as a result (showing that severe distress is a likely ramification of their actions, and therefore reasonably foreseeable), and that even though the execs did not intend suicides, they did intend the psychological harm that precipitated them, which is the basis of the tort in question (emotional/mental distress, also called tort of outrage I believe)), and subsequently leaves them liable for the ensuing damages, including the deaths (damages being distinct from criminal guilt that is established in criminal judicial proceedings).

Quoting VagabondSpectre

and subsequently leaves them liable for the ensuing damages

If you're the victims' lawyer for the civil suit, you're motivated to get as much as you can from the executives.

It all comes back to the bottom line.

Reply to frank Corporations only care about the bottom line, which is why extracting justice from them in the form of damages (cash), is an effective deterrent against such torts.

But yes, I would do the best job I could for my clients and seek the maximum; such is how the adversarial legal systems work, and their lawyers would be seeking to pay nothing, or even to counter-sue for legal fees.

This is a feature of the legal system though, not a bug.

It all goes back to this foolish enlightenment idea that giving all sides a fair chance to make their strongest case (in what is essentially a debate) is the best way to allow the truth to surface.

Reply to VagabondSpectre So the fact that you make your living off of securing damages has no bearing?

Actually in your case that's probably true.

Reply to frank I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that it's corrupt for lawyers to seek the maximums?

In much the same way, criminal prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers seek the maximums and minimums for their clients (the people via the state and the defendant). Even if a defense lawyer knows that their client is guilty and believes that they should be given a harsh sentence, that must not stop them from trying to get their client off with the lowest possible conviction or sentence. The prosecutor is going to try and get the severest conviction, and so to balance that out the defense must seek the minimum. Rather than a craps shoot of people getting the book thrown at them vs getting off scott free, what tends to happen is the prosecution argues why the defendant is guilty and deserves incarceration or punishment, and the defense argues why the defendant is either not guilty or more usually, why they should be given a low sentence due to "mitigating factors" after admitting guilt. Once guilt has been shown, the sentence is tempered by the judge according to those mitigating factors.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I would expect that in many cases, overall efficiency of production coincides with worker well-being, because healthy, happy people do better work, and poorer people spend more of their income so paying more to the poor and working classes instead of the upper classes means more demand and higher profits for businesses, and so on. The people on top treating the people on bottom poorly is irrational behavior that fails to look at what a detriment it makes in the big picture, because being rich and powerful doesn't necessarily mean you're a smart, systemic, forward-thinker.

Amazon seems to be doing rather well with mistreatment.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/revealed-amazon-employees-suffer-after-workplace-injuries

https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/

https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-drivers-warehouse-conditions-workers-complains-jeff-bezos-bernie-1118849

https://www.thetriangle.org/opinion/amazon-has-a-history-of-mistreating-its-employees/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/amazon-warehouse-reports-show-worker-injuries/602530/

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-peak-2019-2?r=US&IR=T

https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-an-amazon-warehouse-employee/

Quoting Coben

Amazon seems to be doing rather well with mistreatment.

True, but only because automation has largely rendered their human assets more expendable. Without their automation tech, Amazon would need millions upon millions more employees to actually work, which would give the employees actual bargaining power.

Reply to VagabondSpectre They need the ones they have and those are the ones they are treating poorly. In the current economy workers have less options. Amazon does everything it can to suppress unions. It does need the workers, or it would let them go. But it can replace them easily enough and mistreat the replacements. It's a workable business model.

Quoting frank

I know it was callous. It also happens to be true. That said, I'd rather be in a society that reaches out with compassion to people who are in pain than one that sees them as superfluous (even though we probably all are.)

Make up your mind, Frank: either you want to live in a compassionate society, and one where people are NOT seen as standardized production units that are interchangeable and removable without consequence, OR you can accept a society where employees are superfluous (we are not quite there yet), disposable, and a COST rather than an ASSET -- which is current practice.

Quoting frank

I once heard that when workers unionize, they just get two asshole bosses instead of one since unionizers tend to be belligerent buttheads.

Did this pearl of wisdom fall out of your head when you last blew your nose? Look, corporations are often quite flawed, because corporate bosses are flawed, and unions are flawed because the membership (and leaders) are flawed. "Nothing straight was ever built with the crooked timber of mankind" Kant said. Truer words are rarely spoken.

The AFSCME union to which I belonged at one time was not highly effective largely because its membership was kind of passive and timid. The leadership wasn't great, but then the membership wasn't either. Plus, the relatively recently organized AFSCME unit to which I belonged was at a public university where the administration had not thought it worthwhile during the previous century to consider the needs or interests of the people who performed all of the diverse services we provided.

Still, workers have nothing else other than solidarity to protect themselves from the predations of corporate wolves or state bureaucrats. The efforts to build solidarity may be halting and clumsy, but eventually concerted efforts pay off. The old Bell Telephone System treated its employees quite well because the Communication Workers of America had put the telephone company over the barrel enough times for Bell to fear the wrath of CWA. GM started paying attention to union demands after the workers seized control of their big assembly plant.

Reply to Coben I wasn’t suggesting that a particular company necessarily has to be good to its employees to be highly profitable right now, but that actual overall economic efficiency (of an entire society across its history) often coincides with being good to the workers. Like how a more deadly bacterium may be individually more successful but its species be less fit because it wipes out all its hosts, or how a species may be highly successful at exploiting its environment moment to moment but then drive itself into extinction by over-exploiting it in the long term. Long term big picture success requires the powerful to see to the success of those they depend upon, lest they run out, or burn out, and the powerful who depend on them then have none to depend on. Short term parochial success is not prohibited by this trend, but focusing only on that is the literal definition of shortsightedness, and thus folly.

Reply to Pfhorrest I think the being good to workers period was very small. And the rights and protections of workers have been eroding. Certainly once Reagan got in. The being nice to workers is fairly local both in time and space. I am not even sure we have enough information to know what the long term consequencs of doing this are. I would love it if there was a causal relationship. I am extremely critical corporate abuse of power. I think right off the bat we need to end corporate personhood and also stop treating being a corporation as a right, but rather treat it as a priviledge, which was precisely the intention of corporate charters: they could be revoked for bad behavior. I am not one who thinks if the founders intended it or said it, it is like the Bible. But they did in fact realize the dangers of corporate power, wrote about it, and tried to ensure that nothing like the East India company and its peers could come along. But they have. i would love it if it neatly created a feedbacks system. Look, Charles, when we treat the workers well, we do better. But I don't think it is neat like that and for long swatches of history labor was not treated well and very large successful by the standards of the elites societies and empires formed. China doesn't even need democracy to thrive along capitalist lines. The powerful benefit from having a somewhat to very desperate worker pool in many ways. And even if------------if it turns out in the long run that this causes them problems, I don't think they can learn that. But actually I think history supports rather than counters their basic urge to not give a shit and take from other classes. And it's not a few companies, there has been five or so decades of decline, in the US for example, of worker rights and treatment. A decline in unions, aided by neocon policies. A destruction of the welfare net, which did give workers some leverage if they knew they could survive outside of a particularly bad employer's grip. And that was carried out to a large degree by Clinton Gore. And the rich are getting richer during these decades. It continued under Obama, for all his supposed 'communism' and he brought in Wall st. right off the bat. I don't think these are stupid people, the warning signs are not warnings about things that matter to them.

Reply to ssu

The roots of the case date back about two decades, to a period when the company, then known by the name France Télécom, was still part of the government's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Once a state-run monopoly, the company sold off most of its shares and underwent a process of privatization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

That process left its employees in an uncomfortable situation: still enjoying the strong employment protections of civil servants, but working for a management structure newly constrained by the marketplace and looking to shed costs to compete.

I imagine this to be a huge clash of cultures and those workers caught caught in the middle and didn’t have the skills to adapt. That doesn’t exonerate the company but I can’t think of two more diametrically opposed attitudes about work.

Quoting VagabondSpectre

Even if a defense lawyer knows that their client is guilty and believes that they should be given a harsh sentence, that must not stop them from trying to get their client off with the lowest possible conviction or sentence. The

I don't think the average lawyer is valiantly upholding the Greek ideal, though. It's about money, which translates to security and power.

The OP was mainly asking how we could hold person A responsible for person B's suicide. It quickly rolled down the path of practicality and taxes.

Intellectually, I dont think we can hold a boss responsible for an employee suicide. If we do, that's all emotion. That says something about the nature of morality.

Quoting Bitter Crank

Make up your mind, Frank: either you want to live in a compassionate society, and one where people are NOT seen as standardized production units that are interchangeable and removable without consequence, OR you can accept a society where employees are superfluous (we are not quite there yet), disposable, and a COST rather than an ASSET -- which is current practice.

It's like being a character in a novel and reading the book at the same time. The character is all caught up in a grand drama, the reader knows none of it really matters.

Quoting Bitter Crank

I once heard that when workers unionize, they just get two asshole bosses instead of one since unionizers tend to be belligerent buttheads.
— frank

Did this pearl of wisdom fall out of your head when you last blew your nose?

No, it was some old guy. :)

Quoting frank

We weren't talking about whether or not it's right. We were talking about whether it costs the taxpayers money. But since you brought it up, why would you say that being an ******* is wrong?

It's kind of in the definition.

By the bye, if you're talking about who is culpable, then you are talking about whether it is right or wrong.

Quoting Baden

It's a choice. As a society we choose what we will put up with. Why should potential "efficiency gains" outweigh every other consideration? You could get efficiency gains by forcing kids to work, extending the working week to 60 hours, abolishing retirement. That would toughen us all up too. The question is why would we want that?

This is a million dollar question. We are a loving, caring society, the globe is with its people. In some areas. Not all.

But it used to be not like this for about two-three thousand years.

And before that, before agriculture and civilization, it used to be like that for a very long time.

So what makes or breaks goodness is on one hand economy, on the other hand survival advantage, and on the third, public wish-public opinion-public attitude-public zeitgeist.

Message to some of the correspondents: Why are we trying to convince Frank of something that he won't be convinced of, based on his principles? It's cruel. Let him be.

A person's principles are bigger than himself, and definitely bigger than the opinions of anyone else.

People go to death because of their principles. A few philosophical arguments are child's play compared to death. If I were you, I'd leave it at that.

Quoting fdrake

Maybe this will help you rustle people's jimmies.

(1) Countries' legal systems should be able to punish those responsible for working conditions that provably and significantly impede health.

(2) Working conditions that provably and significantly contribute to death and sickness impede health. (1, consequence)

(3) There are many independent reports of working conditions at Orange significantly contributing to deaths and sickness and they should be trusted and treated as evidence. (Premise)

(4a) It is reasonable to believe that working conditions at Orange contributed significantly to deaths and sickness. (3, using the evidence).

(4b) It is unreasonable to believe that working conditions at Orange did not contribute significantly to deaths and sickness (3, using the evidence).

(5) France's legal system should be able to punish those responsible at Orange for the working conditions at their company as they provably and significantly impeded health.

I essentially agree with this.

Reply to god must be atheist Please don't revolve around the thread talking in front of my back.

Open the doors of the windows and let the climate in. And please don't put the logo so visually on the pod cover.

Thank you.

Reply to frank YES!

Oh Brother, you have seen the light!

Merry Christmas! :halo: :up: :sparkle:

Quoting Brett

I imagine this to be a huge clash of cultures and those workers caught caught in the middle and didn’t have the skills to adapt. That doesn’t exonerate the company but I can’t think of two more diametrically opposed attitudes about work.

It isn't about the skills of the employess or adaption to new organizations and work.

It's more about a serious cultural issue.

Some French person working for the state of FRANCE, be it in the military, or be it in various ministries or be it in the post office (I assume they were then civil servants) is really, REALLY, different than to work at McDonalds. Sorry, but the nation state hasn't been yet killed and buried.

That's the huge problem here.

You have to understand that someone employed as a civil servant or someone working for your country is genuinely different from the ordinary business transaction that one makes when working for a private firm.

Quoting Brett

I imagine this to be a huge clash of cultures and those workers caught caught in the middle and didn’t have the skills to adapt.

This was not about having the skills to adapt or not. Orange deliberately placed staff in roles they were not suited or trained for, assigned tasks and timeframes that were unachievable, didn't offer the needed training, under-assigned personel for projects and so on. This was a deliberate ploy to ensure that staff would fail and feel so incredibly miserable that they would quit. Not a 'clash of cultures'. A malicious, designed attempt at cost-cutting though immerseration.

Reply to ssu Merry Christmas!

Quoting frank

In the case of depression and anxiety disorders the cause is likely to be genetic. You can't have a genetic predisposition to having your head ripped off in a combine accident, so agricultural accidents can be easily traced to a lack of safety precautions. Psychological disorders can't be.

Equivocating between a cause and a predisposition doesn't help much. Let's grant that mental illnesses do not occur without genetic predisposition, genetic predisposition alone doesn't lead to the development of any mental illness - it also needs a facilitating environment for them to develop. The environment at Orange has been established as sufficiently terrible to cause mental illness; whether it caused it in only those with a genetic predisposition doesn't matter, it provably contributed to lots of death and even more sickness.

Moreover, why would a disease having a genetic predisposition absolve a company of their responsibility to their workers? They had contracts, Orange hated the contract, they abused their workers to make them fuck off.

The role genetic predisposition plays in your argument is to centre the legal (and moral) responsibility for Orange's harassment of workers onto the workers. For that, you need a better account of genetic predisposition and how it relates to workplace environments to be convincing.

"It isn't his fault he's drawing false analogies, he's genetically predisposed to!"

Quoting frank

Source?

Here ya go.

Quoting frank

Has France started legally mandating good management practices?

No, more people would go to the gulags if this happened. What happened was the work environment at Orange was judged as being sufficiently terrible to count as severe harassment, they had a responsibility for their workers' welfare, and these two things together make an enforceable claim that they contributed (bore responsibility) to workers' deaths.

Quoting frank

I just pointed out that an abusive environment can produce efficiency gains. It's called bootcamp. It's you who wants to make the positive claim that abusive workplaces create costs for society in general. I'm not seeing it. As BC pointed out, every job has a downside. You get paid to put up with it.

Why would an office environment be anything like a military boot camp in terms of what counts as a needless hazard?

Quoting frank

The world is full of assholes. Sooner or later we all have to learn how to deal with that. An asshole boss is an opportunity to either learn how to deal with abuse or grow a spine stiff enough to get yourself out of the situation

That goes for asshole bosses on the wrong end of a judge and jury. Or one in a world where certain kinds of behavior caused by being an asshole lead to certain kinds of societal punishment and censure.
They can grow a hard or get a spine hard enough for prison or be clever enough not to breaks social contracts. They can learn also.

ASsholes are not the weather that the rest of humanity must learn to deal with. They also have to learn to deal. And now a certain kind of French Employer asshole has some new information to learn from or not.

Quoting fdrake

Orange was judged as being sufficiently terrible to count as severe harassment, they had a responsibility for their workers' welfare, and these two things together make an enforceable claim that they contributed (bore responsibility) to workers' deaths.

I agree. Furthermore, to preempt any arguments why the bosses should not be responsible and expected to not be horribly abusive: this belongs in the area of tort law, which deals with the required care of each individual for their fellow humans. Under the auspices of the consideration of tort law issues, if you see a man drowning in a lake, and you have a means to pull him to safety, you HAVE to do it; if you fail, you can be charged with neglect of a person in need.

This is the law, all over the civilized world. You can't really let a man die or get injured because you are neglectful or intentionally not helping when you could.

There are a lot of these cases coming out of police arrests and custody, as well as from jails, where the inmates or people taken into custody are beaten to death not only by the jail keepers, but by their cell mates.The police and the jail keepers have the responsibility and they must act within its dictates, to save the fellow humans from unnecessary, accidental, deaths, or from other forms of avoidable harm.

There are other cases coming out of familial neglect; a dying family member dies because care needed is not provided by the family. The fact he or she, the dying person, is hateful, unbearably bad, abusive, etc. is not a condition for refusing to provide care.

And of course, there are the baby killers, who take their ill children to untrained healers, such as to charlatans, and the child dies.

And of course there is the clash between fundamentalist christian sects and the secular law, who, when certain illness strikes, could save their children, family, brethren, but don't due to religious considerations. These cases may for instance involve a life-saving blood transfusion which the religious think is evil and against the will of their god.

The case of the bosses driving workers to suicide can be argued to have contravened the tort law, which requires to give enough care to save people from harm or death.

Reply to fdrake Your concern for the workers is a tribute to either your kind heart or the fact that you direct most of your talent into sophistry. Maybe both.

Ssu provided information that makes the situation a little more understandable. The telecommunications company had been operated by the government. The government left the company in a non-competitive state. When the company became private, the executives struggled to keep the company afloat with their hands tied because the employees kept the protected status they had when the company was government owned.

I know exactly what happened at the company.

Reply to frank Yes, the new owners faced with a situation that was obviously going to be there from before their privitization purchase, chose to act immorally. They could not possibly have been surprised by the situation (employment contracts, for example) and of course their creativity and that of some analysts could only come up with one possible solution, which they must have had in advance as their choice to purchase. Coincidentally during the privitization trend the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer and the middle class smaller. All due to the privitization processes advocated and lobbied for and using control of media to make them seem 'obvious' and 'competitive'. So, they helped create a situation, could not possibly have been surprised by it and chose to immorally and in violation of contracts treat their workers in such a terrible fashion that they would leave.

Quoting frank

Your concern for the workers is a tribute to either your kind heart or the fact that you direct most of your talent into sophistry.

I had no idea that pointing out unsupported assumptions, equivocations and falsehoods was sophistry. Posting arguments in premise-entailment form as an initial response, that well known strategy of sophists.



Quoting frank

It's better to work with nature and allow small adjustments (which might include 35 suicides), rather than prop up an artificial system that will eventually fail in a larger bloody adjustment.

You attempt to portray Orange's provable mistreatment of workers as heroic, as necessary for adaptation for Orange's market success, as natural - as opposed to the 'artificial' contracts the targeted Orange employees had. All this does is portrays the management strategies, which were proved beyond reasonable doubt to lead to employee suicides, as beyond criticism by allying them with natural forces - despite being choices in management style (apparently nature flows from the management reorg). You claim that this is good in the aggregate despite there being very good evidence that such practices, even less extreme cases, cause huge productivity losses the world over and have demonstrably huge social costs. I substantiated both those claims and provided you with a source.

Quoting frank

The fact that the job market was tight indicates that France is overpopulated and some portion of the workers need to move to where there are jobs

"Orange's workplace management strategy of targeted harassment had to do with the fact that France was overpopulated and that the job market was tight, not to do with circumventing protections and compensation upon firing afforded to the workers at France Telecom from their previous contract"

These are just assertions with no argument.

Quoting frank

It's a little harder see how to apply that in the case of psychological abuse because while asbestos has pretty much the same effect on everyone, moral harassment doesn't. Some people thrive on an emotionally charged environment that includes permission to be abusive (which is provided by an abusive executive.)

"A work environment does not contribute to employee sickness if it does not result in that sickness for all employees" and "High pressure work environments are the same as intentionally abusive management strategies"

The first also contradicts:

Quoting frank

In the case of depression and anxiety disorders the cause is likely to be genetic. You can't have a genetic predisposition to having your head ripped off in a combine accident, so agricultural accidents can be easily traced to a lack of safety precautions. Psychological disorders can't be.

The idea that it's a genetic predisposition. That the worker suicides had anything to do with a genetic predisposition or genetic cause is also un-argued for. If you want to establish that the workers at Orange committed suicide predominantly because of their genetic predisposition, you need stronger evidence tying the workers at Orange who committed suicide's genetic profile to the environment, then you need to establish that the environment was not the main driving force regarding their development of the illness. As it stands, the management strategies were established as intentionally abusive.

You attempt to do this by simultaneously downplaying the demonstrated effects the workplace had on its workers and shifting the onus of responsibility to them for their harassment.

Quoting frank

The world is full of assholes. Sooner or later we all have to learn how to deal with that. An asshole boss is an opportunity to either learn how to deal with abuse or grow a spine stiff enough to get yourself out of the situation.

There's a big difference between an asshole boss with bad management (which, inevitably, leads to bad working conditions) and tailoring management practices to abuse people into quitting.

Quoting frank

When the company became private, the executives struggled to keep the company afloat with their hands tied because the employees kept the protected status they had when the company was government owned.

You continue to portray what happened as necessary or inevitable and leave it at that. Even if you grant that enforced redundancy was necessary for Orange to continue growing as a company, this does not establish that any particular way of enforced redundancy is good or bad. As it stands, their management practices were tailored to make people quit "out the door or out the window" (quote from Orange management), case reports were given in court of what the management did, it was established as abusive (not just "high pressure") and not necessary.

Your posts in this thread are full of unsubstantiated conjecture, rhetorical flourishes and reframing attempts, presented with conviction, you also "know" that what you're saying is true...

STRANGER: Then the Sophist has been shown to have a sort of conjectural or apparent knowledge only of all things, which is not the truth?

THEAETETUS: Exactly; no better description of him could be given.

Reply to fdrake Merry Christmas. :)

Quoting fdrake

There's a big difference between an asshole boss with bad management (which, inevitably, leads to bad working conditions) and tailoring management practices to abuse people into quitting.

Exactly. There was a specific and general goal. The assholeness was performed utterly consciously, with a specific objective. It's not simply a personality trait.

And a number of posts here seem to be implicitly arguing that personality traits are being punished. However it is actually a strategy intended to create suffering that is being considered illegal. That was it's specific goal.

It is a form of torture in fact.

I will cause suffering using these tools to force behavior X from my victims.

Reply to Coben I'm going to sue Cheez-it for making their Grooves product, of which the Original Cheddar has been established to be addictive. Since the package clearly states "Deep Flavor. Deep Crunch" I can only assume that they intended for me to become addicted and gain weight and have my health threatened by the 100% Real Cheese (which I doubt).

Reply to frankI think if you actually tried to connect your argument to the topic, it would be quite tricky, rather than simply making a reach with an analogy without directly outlining the argument.. But let's take the most charitable interpretation and work from there. If the bosses at the telecom could not be shown to have instituted abusive practices with the intention of causing people to quit, then they should be set free. If their policies and applications of policies made sense and the unpleasantness was merely an inevitable byproduct of that, then they that becomes a reasonable defense. And then it is up to a court to decide whether the intention was simply to make good business decisions or to make people suffer. Yes, if a food product has a known addictive substance in it, not unlike cigarrettes, say, and the way that chemical is used by the manufacturer is as an addictive substance and intend to addict people, sure, I think they could be liable for that. Not unlike how we treat illegal drug distributers for the same reasons. If the new bosses were making tough decisions, but reasonable ones, then I think they have a good defense. If they did things like assign people to tasks that did not suit them, for example, didn't suit their skills and training for example, this does not make good business sense so other motivations are at play. I haven't analyzed the French case. But I see no reason to per se dismiss the idea that the bosses could be shown to have been intentionally cruel, to have made decisions with the intention of punishing and torturing people to leave their jobs. Perhaps the court did a poor job of analyzing the evidence. Showing evidence of this, I think, makes more sense than the food product analogy. But if not, if the bosses did in fact intended to make people suffer enough to resign, then I'm pleased they got slapped back on by society. And they must have known what the situation was before purchasing the telecom. I think the argument that they had to institute abusive policies to be competitive doesn't hold, since it should be clear that the policies were not intended to make people suffer. Now there will be gray areas. Some restructuring might be stressful but inevitable. But from the articles it seems like there were vindictive actions taken and also decisions made that did not make business sense, but did make sense if their goal was to make people suffer. If that is the case, I don't see why that should be treated differently from more direct forms of violence where the goal is to make someone suffer.

Now let's say we had a food product company that added a step in the manufacting process such that irritating dust made the factory a very unpleasant work environment. And they did this when the workers starting union organizing. Or when it could be shown they wanted to break a long standing union. And the step in the manufacturing process did not make their product better.

Reply to Coben I'm working on a collage-mural where the dominant background colors are blood red and a sort of turquoise-green color. Wandering through the landscape are people who vaguely look like x-rays of people, some have red antlers. Some have red wounds with black veins extending out. Some have little faces embedded in their chests or abdomens.

Since I can move the people around, I've been struck by how different they are against different backgrounds. A collection of people against the blood red appear to be ominous and victimized, although the scenery sometimes turns into roses and so violence and sex are there ("There's no sex in your violence" is a line from a Bush song that keeps going through my mind.)

When they cross over into the turquoise, things change. They somehow calm down. The red antlers are now in conflict with the calm, mossy, mistiness as if the pain has been imported and doesn't belong.

So imagine that there are worlds that are mostly red. The round red wounds with the radiating black lines just blend in with the background and nobody thinks of calling a lawyer. Then there are worlds (like France) that are mostly green and the pain and violence are just wrong. The background announces that it's wrong. If someone doesn't understand why it's wrong, all the residents of green-world will do is point to the background. It's green. The red antlers are violent. They don't belong.

From the point of view of the red-dweller, the green-land people are childish. How will they survive in the real world? They'll be gobbled up and spat out into a ditch to die!

From the point of view of the greenlanders, the red people are monstrous. They're really not. If you could pick them up and move them around, you'd see that they're all the same.

Quoting frank

From the point of view of the greenlanders, the red people are monstrous. They're really not. If you could pick them up and move them around, you'd see that they're all the same.

You don't need to demonise the Orange staff to demonstrate that what they did was wrong.

Demonstration of empathy: I'm sure there were heated boardrooms meetings where managers protested against the poor management practices, that they had lots of consternation in their guts, but believed ultimately that what they were doing was for the greater good - the good of the company and all the workers, surely it's better for the company to succeed and have all those jobs than risk going bust from firing redundancy packages? It's for the good of the employees not to put undue risk to the company; which boils down to not jeopardising the bottom line; the profit rate; and doing what needs to be done to get the organisation in a competitive state of sustainable growth.

But - you need that myth to vindicate and justify their management's conduct. You don't need any myth to demonstrate that their conduct was intentionally abusive and substantially contributed to employee suicide and sickness.

Reply to fdrake I meant that I come from redworld. I've experienced most of the things those people were subjected to. Nobody was trying to fire me, its just that working that way contributed to a manager's bonus. It doesnt show up as criminal in my world.

I'm not trying to vindicate anybody. I was looking at it more as natural history.

A new kind if person has entered my mural. When I cut out the x-ray people it leaves behind a negative-space person. That person's content IS the background.

MuuuHahahahaha!