By rejecting, on Tuesday January 21, the appeals of the former CEO of France Telecom Didier Lombard and his deputy executive director Louis-Pierre Wenès, the Court of Cassation made their convictions final in the suicide case which shook the former public telecommunications company which became Orange in 2013.
From 2006 to 2011, a wave of suicides hit the company's employees. Alerted by the unions, the courts highlighted the Next plan, a brutal managerial policy put in place in 2006 to provoke the voluntary departure of a fifth of the workforce, or 22,000 of the 110,000 employees of the recently privatized group.
The courts had received 19 cases of suicide, 12 attempts and 8 serious depressions: Orange was then the first CAC 40 company to have to explain itself in court for acts of “institutional moral harassment”. The company and its managers will be sentenced at first instance in 2019, then on appeal in 2022.
If Orange had decided not to appeal to the Court of Cassation, creating a compensation commission to discuss with the unions the compensation of any employee possibly affected by institutional harassment during the period, Didier Lombard and Louis-Pierre Wenès, sentenced to one year in prison and a €15,000 fine, had contested their conviction before the highest French court.
-Extensive view of moral harassment
They believed that if the company could have been guilty of “institutional moral harassment”, themselves could not be condemned for “moral harassment” for having decided and implemented the company's policy even if it may have led to a deterioration of working conditions.
For the Court of Cassation, the “institutional moral harassment” falls well within the scope of «moral harassment at work» as defined by the penal code, even without “repeated actions” with regard to a single victim (the same act against numerous employees is sufficient), and even without a direct and personal relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. “The fact that perpetrator and victim belong to the same work community is sufficient”estimate the judges.
Applying an extensive vision of the 2002 law on moral harassment, the Court therefore judges that “actions aimed at stopping and implementing, with full knowledge of the facts, a company policy which aims to degrade working conditions (pour) achieve workforce reduction » constitutes “a situation of institutional moral harassment”.
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