Imagine: your firm plays by the rules, does everything it is supposed to and more, because it holds itself to the highest standards in the industry. Your firm has happy customers and satisfied workers. Then, one morning, you find that your firm has been blacklisted, held up as a bad example by the labor ministry; the news, including your firm’s name, is carried prominently by the media, and is visible to all on a dedicated, government web site.

This really happened, in France, last week.

Labor minister Xavier Darcos, a card-carrying conservative, has been working on a national plan on stress in the workplace. In one initiative, the labor ministry sent firms that employ more than 1,000 people –there are about 1,500 such firms in France– a questionnaire about stress prevention. The questionnaire asked only whether the firm had set up a committee to discuss the issue with unions or labor representatives; it did not ask about measured stress levels or what firms actually did to change working conditions.

About 600 firms did not return the questionnaire. (That corresponds to a 40% rate of no response.) These firms, together with those that did reply but answered that they had not set up a committee, were lumped into a red list. By comparison, firms with committees looking into the matter were placed on an orange list (the middle light on a French traffic signal is orange, not yellow); and firms that had signed some kind of agreement with unions or employee representatives won a spot on a green list.

The labor ministry posted all three lists to the web, to an official, government site. In one day, more than a million visitors consulted the lists, according to Le Parisien. As abruptly as the lists went up, the labor ministry then pulled down the red and orange lists.

The lists had been exposed to public view for about 24 hours, but that was time aplenty for “redlisted” firms to suffer a public relations setback by being labeled as bad workplaces: a red light means “stop”.