Please don't jump
The deputy chief executive of France Telecom has fallen on his sword – to use a totally inappropriate metaphor – in response to an “epidemic” of suicides among employees.
Just what is this epidemic? In 19 months, 24 employees of the telecoms giant, which owns Orange, have committed suicide. The trade unions have made a huge fuss, claiming that bullying tactics by the management have led to the deaths. The French Government is taking a close interest.
Any suicide is a source of sadness and regret. But is this actually an epidemic? Hardly.
The suicide rate in France is relatively high, at 17.8 per 100,000 per year. It is falling, but it is still higher than most other European countries (Germany 13.2, UK 6.8). The French spend a lot of time boasting about their life, but it’s hardly reflected in the number who choose to leave it by their own hand.
France Telecom has 100,000 employees, so if their makeup matches that of the French nation as a whole, one would expect 17.8 suicides a year among their employees, or 28 in 19 months. In fact, there appear to have been 24. No epidemic. Not that you'd know that if you read The Times. Here's its headline today:
If France Telecom has more male employees than female, one would expect even more suicides, since the rate for men is 26.4 per 100,000 per year, and for women only 9.2. But I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of the workforce by sex.
You might counter-argue that people in work are less likely to kill themselves than the average French citizen. However, even allowing for that, the figures don’t add up to an epidemic, or anything like it. They are no higher than they have been in the past at France Telecom, when nobody made a fuss.
The management of the company has been trying desperately to get these facts aired but once a story like this gets legs it’s hard to corrall. All credit to John Lichfield and Alexandra Mauviel for spelling it out in The Independent, even if the headline some sub wrote on the story got it wrong. "Why are so many France Telecom Workers dying?" it asked. They aren’t. That was the point of the article.
Steve Bundred (not verified) wrote,
Thu, 08/10/2009 - 13:24
Nigel
Although the suicide rate in the UK is low overall, I believe it is significantly higher for workers in the agricultural sector. As France has a large agricultural sector, this may explain the high average rate for France as a nation. And as France Telecom is not an agricultural industry, it may be inappropriate to compare its rate with that of France as a whole.
Good Point (not verified) wrote,
Fri, 16/10/2009 - 14:54
I agree that statistically the number is not unexpected. However, many of these cases were accompanied by suicide notes directly implicating France Telecom. I have no data on the number of cases where FT was sited as a cause of the suicide.
Don Pilarz (not verified) wrote,
Thu, 12/11/2009 - 21:35
The writer of this article shows little understanding of statistics!! The varying distribution of suicides across the wide range of social conditions in a country is one of the most significant factors to take into account when evaluating the meaning of statistical data.
The figures accounting for an entire nation can hardly be extrapolated in a meaningful way to a population within a specific sector. Furthermore, given that that sector is suffering from potentially harmful levels of stress might well be a necessary criteria for evaluation, among many others.
The writer shows an incredible ineptness for reasoning: he should not be writing about statistics. This sort of pseudo-science is dangerous!
Nigel Hawkes (not verified) wrote,
Mon, 16/11/2009 - 15:39
Possibly so. But if Don Pilarz is right, he should include in his criticisms Rene Padieu, head of the Committee of Ethics of the French Statistics Society, who presented a very similar argument to mine in the 22 October edition of La Croix, the French daily newspaper. Clearly you can't extrapolate a national statistic to a specific sector, but it's a reasonable first approximation. It would doubtless be better to have a suicide rate for industrial workers matched by age and sex to the FT workers. If anybody has access to such figures, let me know.
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