According to an article in Fierce Telecom, FT has seen its 24th employee suicide recently. The brief says:

Employee morale at France Telecom took another hit yesterday as a 51-year-old worker committed suicide by jumping off a highway overpass during peak morning traffic. [...] This is the twenty-fourth suicide to happen at France Telecom in the past 18 months. [...] “It’s shameful. He worked in a service long known to be unbearable,” Diochet told Agence France-Press. “There was a real indifference, no humanity, all they talked about was numbers and workers were treated like sausage meat. We thought management would have learned a lesson.”

According to my quick math (with assistance from Wolfram Alpha) it would seem that the rate of suicide at FT is an order of magnitude greater than the average–roughly 10 times the normal rate. That’s an attention-grabbing statistic. It makes me surprised that nobody has gone postal yet, or just run away (for the less-violent). I certainly hope that something can be done to bring humanity back into the corporate equation at FT.

UPDATE – CORRECTION – 24-OCT-2009

Thanks to the semi-anonymous comment from “dfb”, I stand corrected. FT’s suicide rate is not an order of magnitude greater than the national average. Rather, my “quick math” was off by an order of magnitude. If I recall correctly, I believe this was due to the use of an incorrect value–the number of layed-off employees rather than the actual employee count.   I apologize for this large mistake.

According to public data, the probability of suicide as a cause of death in France is approximately 1.6% to 1.9%. Meanwhile, if FT has experienced ~24 suicides recently and has an employee base of between 160,000 and 180,000 (depending on how layoffs have affected the company–I don’t have that data at this time), then FT does in fact have a rate that is similar to the national average. In fact their rate would appear to be lower than than the national average, being around 1.3% to 1.5%.

A brief search for data on the demographics of suicide was not particularly useful. For instance I would be interested to know how the FT rates stand up against other corporate environments of similar size and population. Setting this unknown comparison aside, it would appear that the FT suicide story is not actually an interesting correlation. Sorry for encouraging an un-scientific story. I’ll be more careful next time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 12:28 and is filed under Culture, Finance, Politics, Random, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.