Former France Telecom-Orange CEO Didier Lombard has given the courts his version of events and factors involved in a wave of employee suicides in 2008 and 2009, Les Echos reports. Though no higher than the national average, as a percentage of the total workforce, several of the victims blamed their working situation as a contributing factor in their suicide notes. The operator's Next strategic plan included 22,000 job cuts and staff being forced to change their job location or job description. Many workers were with the incumbent when it was government-owned and had civil servant status. The CFE-CGC union, plaintiff, claims that France Telecom's deliberate decision to cut so many jobs failed to take psychosocial risks into account. Judges also heard from other France Telecom-Orange staff, including Louis-Pierre Wenes, COO at the time of the events, and former HR director Olivier Barberot, now the head of France Telecom subsidiary Globecast. Lombard wrote in Le Monde that the workforce reduction was indespensible to the company's survival and contests that it was the cause of the human dramas cited in support of the lawsuit.
