After the social crisis: the transformation of employment relations at France Télécom

Virginia Doellgast, Maxime Bellego and Elisa Pannini

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This article contributes to debates on the conditions for strengthening collective worker voice in financialized organizations. It examines change in employment relations at France Télécom/Orange (FT) following a social crisis associated with employee suicides in 2007–2009. FT’s labor unions developed creative approaches to study and publicize the negative effects of employment restructuring on workers’ psychosocial health. The common framing they developed became a source of ‘communicative power’, used to influence how the suicides were interpreted both within the firm and in the media. This power was deployed to encourage substantive social dialogue that institutionalized worker participation in management decision-making. Findings demonstrate the potentially transformative role of discursive strategies that assert the legitimacy of worker well-being as both a measure of and input to organizational performance.

JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02-11
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Socio-Economic Review, 11, February, 2020. ISSN: 1475-1461

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:103663

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