Thomas Coutrot

The conviction of France Télécom’s managers for ‘institutional moral harassment’ marks an important step in the jurisprudence, which, for several years, has emphasised the responsibilities of companies with regard to the health consequences of work organisation methods. The question is now being asked in the face of the impasses of ‘shareholder governance’: what could be the main features of modes of governance and work organisation that would be beneficial for the health of humans and nature?

With the France Télécom case of December 2019, for the first time, the top bosses of a CAC 40 group have been sentenced to prison for ‘institutional moral harassment’. But if the trial is exceptional, are the acts judged really so?

Yes, undoubtedly: the project of ‘ejecting 20,000 employees through the door or through the window’, the majority of them being staff members, is unprecedented. But the social debate on suffering at work –of which suicides are the most extreme manifestation– has been going on for more than 20 years and goes far beyond France Télécom. It has its origins in the financialisation of companies and public services, which has put pressure on work by multiplying the constraints of rhythm, procedures, standards, quantified objectives, restructuring, and permanent reporting. Supported by digital technologies, neo-Taylorian lean management has encouraged an intensification of work, a decline in room for manoeuvre, and the loss of meaning in work, reduced to the achievement of quantitative indicators –what Alain Supiot calls ‘governance by numbers’ and David Graeber ‘total bureaucratisation’.

According to the decision-makers, these changes are dictated by the need for efficiency in a ruthless competitive context. But how can we judge the effectiveness of a flurry of reorganisations, when they follow one another at a pace that prevents any evaluation? What is certain, however, is that they contribute to destabilising jobs and work groups, and therefore their capacity to resist. Just as certainly, these reorganisations aim to assure shareholders and investors of the senior managers’ unfailing commitment to deliver the expected returns: the proliferation of indicators is supposed to offer them total transparency regarding the sources of financial performance. More than ever, financial performance is the only compass guiding production and investment decisions, regardless of the environmental cost.

The health impact of this kind of management is well documented. The illusory but obstinate ‘command and control’ project stifles the creative and meaningful part of the activity, that is, the living work, that commitment of the body, the sensitivity and the intelligence that is necessary to deal with the unforeseen, which never fails to occur. Repeated organisational changes, most often imposed without discussion, are highly pathogenic, as an abundant scientific literature attests. A recent study by the DARES^[1] shows that, among employees who experience a reorganisation of their work, the probability of falling into depression is multiplied by two for those who are neither informed nor consulted —the vast majority. And not only at France Télécom, but on a representative sample of employees in France.

At the macrosocial level, dividends have never been so high: the objectives are attained, but inequalities are increasing, investment is stagnating, and productivity gains are tending towards zero despite the much-vaunted digital revolution. As for the environmental crisis, it is worsening at an alarming rate. The Fordist social compromise exchanged submission in work for the promise of happiness in consumption: it is now stumbling over health, ecological and democratic limits. The current trajectory of capitalism is unsustainable, and we are seeing social movements multiplying around the world to challenge it.

1. Management in search of alternatives

In the face of these perils, managers do not remain inert. Four types of behaviour can be distinguished, from the most frequent to the rarest.

To show their goodwill and try to avoid a political backlash, most companies have adopted social and environmental responsibility (SER) initiatives and individual prevention policies for psychosocial risks. Without really changing the way work is organised, they have managed to reduce the most blatant moral violence somewhat, as shown by the significant drop in hostile behaviour at work (from 22% in 2010 to 15% in 2017), according to the recent Sumer survey^[2].

The second type of reaction is that some managers feel it necessary to go further resort to the employees’ expertise on their real work. Within the framework of ‘Quality of Life at Work’, they create spaces for discussion on work, where employees and managers can discuss dysfunctions and possible improvements to the existing framework (Matthieu Detchessahar talks about ‘deliberate enterprise’^[3]). In a way, we are returning to the Japanese spirit of lean management, which wanted to stimulate the participation of workers in determining the norms and standards that organise their work. This can go as far as the election of ‘referent operators’, a kind of delegate for real work, as in the experiment carried out at Renault Flins under the impetus of Yves Clot’s team^[4].

The third attitude, apparently more audacious, is that of those who are not content with more participation, but seek to challenge the ‘command and control’ model itself. ‘Liberated companies’, or more simply ‘agile’ or ‘empowering’ organisations, claim to relax the pressure of demands, reduce or even eliminate controls, and favour working in semi-autonomous teams to exploit the individual and collective intelligence of employees. I will come back to the first assessment that can be drawn from these experiments.

Finally, even more radical, at least in theory —and theory is very important!— the fourth current brings together the advocates of the ‘self-governed enterprise’, who put forward a rather profoundly renewed conception of the organisation of work and the enterprise. The organisation is no longer mechanical but organic, and its organisational design and daily operations are the result of permanent deliberation, oriented not by profit but by a social-ecological mission (profit being only a means to attain the mission). Frédéric Laloux speaks of the company as a ‘living form that transcends its stakeholders, in pursuit of its own evolving raison d’être’^[5]. In Brian Robertson’s holocracy^[6] or Frédéric Laloux’s self-governing company, employees have a very large degree of autonomy in decision-making, which is mission-oriented and based on information obtained from the tools and objects of work, customers and users, colleagues and suppliers. Teams also have the right to control decisions taken at the highest organisational level. In Marxian terms, I would say that these innovative organisational models, unlike Taylorism, rely on subsidiarity and the distribution of power to place dead work (tools, demands, etc.) at the service of living work.

1.1. Three dimensions of autonomy at work

Of course, the ‘liberated companies’ movement —I am returning here to the third of the managerial currents mentioned— neither sets itself nor achieves such ambitions. To understand it, it may be useful to distinguish three levels of autonomy at work. The first is operational autonomy: the ability to decide how to deal with the unexpected in order to achieve a given task or objective. The second is professional autonomy: the possibility to contribute to defining the distribution of tasks, the organisation of work, the ‘management’, as philosopher Isabelle Ferreras says^[7]. The third level is strategic autonomy (‘government’): the possibility of influencing the very purposes of work.

Lean management has strictly controlled, or even stifled, operational autonomy (what the American sociologist Robert Karasek^[8] calls ‘decision-making autonomy’). It is with this first level that most current experiments in ‘liberation’ or empowerment are concerned, most often in the form of semi-autonomous teams.

Rarer are the experiences that extend professional autonomy. We can cite the famous case of the car parts manufacturer Favi^[9], where the teams of workers were —it seems we should speak in the past tense— truly autonomous, since they were responsible for hiring and firing, investments, customer relations, etc. At the Poult biscuit factory^[10], the workers were (again in the past tense) strongly encouraged to invest in product innovation. But the company’s governance and purpose remain untouched: increasing the value of the shareholders’ capital, who can interrupt the experiment at any time, and do not hesitate to do so when they see fit.

Finally, strategic autonomy is rare: it presupposes a transformation of governance, which ensures that the work collective has real power to determine the objectives of the work. In theory, the social and solidarity economy sector could claim this strategic autonomy, but it is highly bureaucratised and not very active on these issues today, including operational or professional autonomy. We need to look at what are known as ‘commons’’ or ‘collaborative cooperatives’ to find truly innovative initiatives that combine horizontal cooperation between peers and a freely chosen societal mission. There is an abundance of local micro-initiatives but also large-scale successes, such as the free software movement or the Buurtzorg association, which now provides home care in the Netherlands^[11].

1.2. The liberated company: a capitalist social movement

Returning to the managerial initiatives for the ‘liberation’ of work, what is their real scope? In my opinion, the ‘liberated company’ is not just a media fad but a real social movement in the sense defined by Eric Neveu^[12] as a ‘form of concerted collective action in favour of a cause’. The case studies clearly show how the leaders —the ‘liberating leaders’— find their inspiration in an ecosystem of pioneers and essayists who present a convergent, if not coherent, discourse (in France, it includes Isaac Getz^[13], Jean-François Zobrist^[14], Michel Hervé^[15], among others).

This movement sustains the project of re-legitimising the authority of capitalist management by reformulating its mode of exercise at the level of concrete work activity. It is not a question of ‘liberating work’ so that it can govern itself by accessing strategic autonomy —the insistence of the authors on the key role of the ‘liberating leaders’ is explicit in this respect— but of delegating the maximum number of operational decisions to employees, while preserving as much as possible the exercise of hierarchical power for strategic decisions. In this sense, we can speak of a capitalist social movement.

Two very recent books (Libérer l’entreprise, ça marche?^[16] and Beyond the Liberated Enterprise^[17]) bring together case studies and indicate some trends. Under the impetus of the ‘liberating leader’, operational —and sometimes even professional— autonomy is stimulated, work becomes more interesting but also more intense, hierarchical control is weakened in favour of peer control, and economic performance often tends to improve. But there is no trace of strategic autonomy, the moral and symbolic authority of the boss being, on the contrary, reinforced. Among the obstacles to transformation, there are the difficulties of local managers in making a smooth transition from leader to coach, and in large groups, the frustration of ‘empowered’ teams who come up against the unchanged functioning of the other departments to which they report.

1.3. An oxymoronic project

This oxymoronic project of ‘capitalist liberation’ of work is rich in fertile contradictions. There is no guarantee that the granting of substantial margins of operational autonomy will not lead to demands for professional autonomy: after all, if one is empowered to decide how to react to an unforeseen situation, why not question the procedures and the established division of labour, which often prevent one from working well? In any case, statistically, in surveys on working conditions there is a strong correlation, even controlling for occupation and level of training, between operational autonomy (dealing with incidents oneself, being able to choose how to work) and professional autonomy (participating in discussions about work, having an influence on organisational changes). And if one gains the power to act on the organisation in the name of the quality of work, does this not logically lead one to reflect on its aims?

Just like in society, the doctrine of shareholder governance —that founding principle of neoliberalism according to which the sole purpose of the company is to increase the value of shareholders’ capital— has lost its political legitimacy. The Notat-Sénard report^[18] proposed in 2018 a new legal status for ‘mission-based companies’, although the PACTE law ultimately retained only a meaningless version of it. In another symptom, the American Business Roundtable issued a ground-breaking statement in the summer of 2019 on ‘the purpose of business’^[19], which they believe should include the well-being of all intervening parts. How can we continue to justify the power of corporate governance being entirely in the hands of shareholders (according to the ‘one dollar, one vote’ principle) when the democratic norm prevails, in principle, in the public sphere and the political and ecological impact of multinationals exceeds that of many states?

Political impact: the considerable influence of lobbies and media controlled by big capitalist interests is well known. Less well known is the deleterious impact of the bureaucratic standardisation of work on democracy. Several recent studies —including one conducted by myself about the French case^[20]— show how the loss of autonomy at work feeds electoral abstention or the far-right vote. Submission to authority and bureaucratic processes at work undermines the capacity for self-determination in the public sphere; as Alexis Cukier^[21] reminds us, the great American philosopher John Dewey used to say: ‘what “democracy” means is that the individual must participate in determining the conditions and objectives of his own work”.

Finally, ecological impact: the destruction of the biosphere originates in abstract work, performed for profit alone and disconnected from its concrete effects on the world. As the ‘Student Manifesto for an Ecological Awakening’^[22] signed by more than 30,000 students, particularly from engineering schools, recently stated, ‘the system of which we are part directs us towards jobs that are often incompatible with the fruit of our reflections and locks us into daily contradictions’. Despite the lofty charters adopted by most multinationals over the past 20 years, CSR initiatives have only marginally altered the social and ecological impacts of production, which continue to be terribly deleterious.

2. Liberating work to heal the world

Therefore, it is undoubtedly time to take note of the political nature of work: what is now at stake within the walls of large companies has such decisive social, health, ecological and political consequences that democracy can no longer remain at its door. Bernie Sanders proposed that employees should have 20% of the capital and 45% of the seats on the board of directors, and in France, Olivier Favereau^[23] and the Collège des Bernardins suggest introducing co-management at 50%, as in Germany. In Gouverner le capitalisme^[24], Isabelle Ferreras proposes a more ambitious project, that of bicameralism, which would force the chamber of capital to agree with that of labour.

However, it is questionable how much power workers in the board of directors or the labour chamber would have if shares remained liquid on the financial markets. It is also questionable whether bicameralism or co-management would be sufficient to ensure that employers and employees, enmeshed in abstract labour and capital appreciation, would take the long term and the environment into account. In this respect, the trade union attitudes of denial, which are common in polluting or dangerous companies, are worrying. Perhaps we should consider not only redefining the company’s missions, but also opening up the local and environmental associations’ right to participate in the governance of groups to guarantee the long term.

But these reforms, although desirable, will be of little consequence if they are not based on a democratic transformation of work itself, if the employees, in connection with the recipients of their work, do not have the power not only to deliberate but also to decide on their work.

In Critique politique du travail^[25], Isabelle Ferreras showed how employees have powerful expectations of democratic justice in labour relations. This is true and important, but many ergonomists and work psychologists^[26] or psychodynamicists^[27] have also long emphasised the centrality, in the daily experience of work, of employees’ aspirations for the development of their living work, the satisfaction of work well done, the recognition of its usefulness, and thus, the construction of their health. Trade unionists^[28] have realised that conflicts over the quality of work can provide a powerful springboard for collective action. The union then conducts a survey with the employees to bring out a common vision of this quality, opposing it to the managerial vision, which is often pathogenic, as we have seen. Experience shows that this approach often makes it possible to rebuild the collective beyond even the statutory divisions. In this conflict, it would be useful to try to form an alliance with the voluntary or involuntary recipients of work (consumers, users, local residents, etc.) whenever possible.

It is now important to think about the institutional innovations that could support such a living work policy^[29].

2.1. Putting an end to pathogenic management^[30]

The law currently defines moral harassment as ‘repeated acts’ characterised by their effects, without saying anything about their nature. This should be specified and clarified with the help of advances in case law and scientific knowledge on suffering at work, summarised by the 2011 report of the College of Experts on Suffering at Work, the ‘Gollac report’. It could be specified that these prohibited ‘behaviours’ are “in particular, the setting of excessive or unrealistic objectives, the assignation of devaluated work, contemptuous or humiliating behaviour, the sidelining of work groups, the obligation to lie or to violate professional ethics and deontology, and the creation of a feeling of permanent insecurity’. It should also be expressly stated that the most serious cases merit the qualification of ‘psychological violence’ and that they are therefore liable to be judged by the Criminal Court, something which nowadays is only implicit.

It is also important to allow for the conviction of company managers who have consented to environmental destruction by demonstrably violating their prevention obligations, even in foreign subsidiaries. The threat of such penalties could help to dissuade shareholders from setting unreasonable profitability targets or to encourage managers to resist them.

2.2. Reinvigorating prevention

Repression is certainly not enough. It is necessary to ban subcontracting, outsourcing and temporary work on all sites at risk. The right of employees to withdraw from work in the event of serious and imminent danger must be made effective by genuinely protecting employees against disciplinary reprisals. In the private and public sectors, occupational medicine and the labour inspectorate, which are currently in disarray, must be considerably strengthened, both in terms of their resources and their independence. It is time to recognise and compensate psychological pathologies linked to the organisation of work and management.

But these reforms will only have a profound effect if employees are given the opportunity to express their views on their work and their aspirations, directly and through their representatives.

2.3. Restructuring employee representation for working conditions and health

Risk prevention presupposes the presence of representatives who are close to the ground, since they are the only ones able to know the real work of employees and to pass on relevant information for the prevention of health and environmental risks. Going in the opposite direction, the Macron ordinances of September 2017 abolished the staff delegates and the Health, Safety and Working Conditions Committees (CHSCT), without which the France Télécom trial would not have been possible.

Conversely, in both the private and public sectors, the proposal is that local representatives be mandatorily elected on each site by all employees; these representatives would contribute to the activity (regardless of their status) and form a Work, Health and Environment Committee (WHEC).

These local committees would have the same rights as the former CHCST (expertise, warning, etc.), extended to include environmental issues. The legitimate intervention of citizen counter-powers (associations, experts) in the WHECs would make it possible to break down the compartmentalisation between the inside and the outside of workplaces, with regard to health and ecological issues.

Another decisive strengthening of their powers: in the event of organisational or technological changes that may be considered dangerous for the physical or mental health of employees or for the environment, the WHEC could exercise a right of suspensive veto. Any disagreement with the employer would be decided by the labour inspectorate or the judge in summary proceedings.

2.4. Reinventing employees’ right to express themselves on their work

The right of employees to express themselves collectively on their work, introduced in 1982, has not kept its promises. It is time to finally draw conclusions from this failure.

This right should be fully recognised as a right of the workers, who alone are able to determine the relevant place for exchange between professionals and, therefore, to entrust their elected representatives with the organisation of spaces for deliberation on work. The employees will have time credits and their free expression will be guaranteed by a collective and anonymous form of giving their opinion, without the work evaluators being able to know the individual origin. The employer will have to give reasoned responses to the proposals emanating from the deliberation spaces.

The France Télécom trial is the culmination of 25 years of intense social debate on suffering at work and 25 years of legislative inertia, with the exception of the 2002 law on moral harassment. It is time for politicians to invent the means to stop this implacable mechanism that damages humans, nature, and democracy.

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