France Télécom is unfortunately not the only one: large companies like HSBC, BNP Paribas, La Poste, EDF, Renault, or Airbus have had to face the issue of the suicide of one or more of their employees. The National Police itself reports about forty suicides among its officers. It is as futile to exclusively blame the company as it is to assign sole responsibility to the individual for their actions. Studies and official reports, such as the one from March 12, 2008, on “The determination, measurement, and monitoring of psychosocial risks at work,” show a phenomenon of “over-determination”: a plurality of causes and an infinite intersection of factors where working conditions, organization, and the psychological distress of human beings are intertwined. The two areas are indeed intimately connected. The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work also estimates that “stress,” the first stage of deterioration in professional and personal situations, “occurs when there is an imbalance between the perception a person has of the constraints imposed by their environment and the perception they have of their own resources to cope with them.”
Addressing the question of suicide at work, therefore, involves questioning the intensity of this imbalance experienced by a human being at a given moment in their life. New forms of work organization – increased job insecurity, fragmented task versatility, and extended geographic mobility – cause a sequencing, a fragmentation of professional acts that is not conducive to forming a corresponding personal identity: who today can still boast of being able to answer the question about their professional activity: “I am…,” as the phrase seems exaggerated, ambitious, if not out of touch, with the realities offered by the labor world in this realm of “essence”? This “lack of being” further highlights the significant return of “emotions” in the professional world. The notion of compensation is thus undergoing a revealing evolution: while salary remains a fundamental motivation element for both workers and executives, they place an almost equivalent need for “recognition”: “association in decision-making,” “listening from their hierarchy” in case of changes in professional structures, or even suggesting “training” whose results will support the requirements of self-confidence and self-esteem. One can glimpse the pitfall: this very subjective notion of “recognition” proves as easy to grasp as the “measurement of well-being” intended to refine future economic indices.
If it is considered disproportionate, irretrievable, devoid of any recourse, psychological suffering, a difficult stage of the “Midlife Crisis,” unjustified discrimination in the workplace related, for example, to sexual orientation or the arbitrariness of a leader who draws unconscious narcissistic compensations from it, then can lead the individual to consider or commit the worst to escape it. Overcome by a feeling of complete dispossession of self, the human being then regards suicide as the “only way out.”
Suicide in a company is also an indirect indictment of the State, perceived as incapable of “regulating economic imbalances,” further accused of having ceded to enterprises this part of injustice – the irrationality of certain salaries bears witness – of which it had until then held the monopoly. At the risk of provoking the individual’s destabilizing “dread.” And rendering any pretense of public authority to intervene in the private management of human resources little credible. So many conditions likely, as Freud wrote, to seal “the defeat of the drive that compels every living being to hold on to life.”
