Paul from Paris

INED, the French demographics institute, came out with an intriguing report on suicide among the incarcerated. These points struck me:

• The suicide rate among incarcerated men in France is six times higher than the rate among the general male population;
• The French rate has increased over 50 years, from 4 in 10,000 in 1960 to 19 in 10,000 in 2008;
• French prisoners exhibit the highest suicide rate among prisoners in the 15 members of European Union for the period 2002-2006;
• Prison overcrowding does not explain the French suicide rate among the incarcerated;
• In France, suicide is most likely to occur at the beginning of detention. This aggravates the suicide rate among those who are detained before trial or judgment. Among those tried and sentenced, suicide correlates with gravity of the offense committed, with convicted murderers and rapists being most likely to commit suicide.

Granted that there are definition and measurement problems, but there’s important social science still to be done on this subject, in Europe and beyond.

I’d commented last month on what has been called a “suicide wave” at France Telecom.

French newspaper La Croix today features a column by René Pardieu, a French statistician. Pardieu comments, People commit suicide less at France Telecom than elsewhere. And, it seems, less than a few years ago. There’s no ‘suicide wave’.”

To reach this view, Pardieu compares the suicide rate for French people aged 20-60 (19.6 per 100,000) and compares it to France Telecom, with 25 suicides in 19 months, or about 16 suicides in one year; France Telecom has about 100,000 employees. These numbers point to human suffering, but not to a suicide wave.

Pardieu takes the preoccupation over suicides as a meaningful symptom of societal unwellness of some sort; on this point we are in agreement, too. Several of France Telecom suicides left behind notes critical of company management or working conditions.

As the media have widely reported, France Telecom has temporarily frozen a compulsory transfer policy that required employees, every three years, to relocate or change jobs. There must have been a reason for this policy, but France Telecom doesn’t seem to be communicating on it today. Common sense suggests that mandatory transfers could be hard on couples and families, for whom moving could be a hardship; or on employees who value seniority or stability, such as those who joined the company when it was a state-owned monopoly.

France Telecom has communicated on one point this week: it commissioned an outside firm to survey all employees about workplace conditions. This troubles me, on two counts:

• An employee survey tends to frame the problem as an employee problem, not a management problem, and to point to coping strategies for employees, not managers;
• Confidentiality works somewhat like a one-way mirror: management commissioned the survey, and management will study aggregate results; I strongly doubt that ordinary employees will have same-time access to the same data.

Is there a business or communications rationale behind the survey? At this point, deplorable working conditions seem to be acknowledged by all parties and by the French public. Given that no one disputes that conditions are bad, is there really something to be gained by measuring the extent of discontent? Why doesn’t company leadership instead vow to have the most satisfied workforce possible, and to survey its employees on what would offer them the greatest satisfaction on the job?