French Workers Kill Themselves
05 October 2009
At the Idler we like to point out the dangers of conventional employment. According to the UN, over two million people every year die from work-related causes. That’s more than from drugs and alcohol combined. Now we read that 24 workers at France Telecom have killed themselves in the last nineteen months. Commentators blame the corporation’s new target-driven strategy. The deaths remind us of the spate of postal worker massacre-suicides in the US over the last two decades, often blamed on one lone nutter, but in actual fact caused by the hyper-stressful working conditions. How long will it be before a UK worker cracks up and shoots his co-workers before turning the gun on himself? Click here to read the France Telcom story in the Daily Telegraph and always remember: work kills.
"All my peers and contemporaries, their work ethic is utterly dictated by materialism: the amount of compromise they will make. IÕve seen them all, from the beginning. I was famous before all of them. I see them now, and I swear to you, they are the living dead. Their work is dead. They have no sparkle about their lives, about themselves. TheyÕre just treading water Ð theyÕre not even treading water, theyÕre treading fucking syrup. Bad syrup."