I worked at France Telecom/Orange from 2004 to 2017. Let me give a bit more context to the situation.

1) as mentioned in the article and comments elsewhere, the majority of employees in FT at that time were civil servants. This meant (as per the privatization deal that was defined by the French govt at the time) that they could not be fired. Ever.

2) the population was pretty old (the average employee age when I joined in 2004 was 48 years old). A lot of people were hired in 1976-1980 by the then-“ministry of posts and telegraphs” to bring copper to every home in France. Those linemen and women were around 50 in 2004. Needless to say, every home in France had long since been plugged to the telephone network so their original work no longer existed. It’s not fun being a 50 year-old civil servant whose skill set is obsolete and no-linger needed.

3) FT was in pretty bad financial shape after purchasing Orange at the height of the dot-com bubble. I remember endless cost-reduction plans at that time, initiated by Lombard’s predecessor (Thierry Breton, who is now C.E.O. of Atos). As an example, the 2003-2005 objective was 15B€ in savings, IIRC.

4) Competition in the French telco space was already fierce at that time. FT, as the incumbent, was under obligation to provide its infrastructures and bulk service at cost+ to all the newcomers. Suddenly it could no longer charge what it pleased, and had to learn about marketing and sales and customer service. At the same time it also had to become a competitive internet provider and mobile operator.

5) Of course the obvious answer was to transition the historic workforce to new jobs required by the change in context and technology: telemarketing, customer service, IT infrastructure (my first job was web developer, and the ops team for our production infrastructure was party made up of ex-linemen. Needless to say, not all of them were comfortable with system administration, and I spent a lot of hours on the phone with them spelling out bash commands). Besides the skills gap, it’s also a very large mindset shift to go from proudly contributing to the modernization and wellbeing of your country, to trying to upsell your customers on a faster Internet offer. (Think going from Bell in its glory days to current-day Comcast)

6) for a very long time, FT’s top leadership (and I mean like the top 4-5 management layers, including all the excom and the CEO - basically anyone at VP level or above) came almost exclusively from a small group of engineers, the “Corps des Télécoms”. These people are extremely bright but not always gifted on the emotional intelligence scale. And they’re very loyal to the company. Plus, there was a huge amount of groupthink — they basically all reason the same way. This only started to change with Lombard’s successor, Stéphane Richard. I mean, he’s also from the Grandes École elite circle, but he went to a business school rather than an engineering one, so, you know. (/s)

Now, I absolutely do NOT condone what happened in FT at that time. But its management had to deal with massive debt, eroding revenues and margins, intense competition, and a large, ageing workforce who needed to be reskilled and had trouble transitioning from public service to competitive market. And who could not be let go.

It was a pretty shitty context, and arguably a textbook example that too much worker protection can actually be a bad thing for the workers themselves. I mean, if a mass layoff (with healthy compensation packages and re-training and so forth) had been possible, FT’s management would most definitely have gone for it, rather than bullying people until they left of their own accord (or took their own life).