The consequences of vertical management and unhappiness at work. This Thursday, November 13, the National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam) was fined 50,000 euros for involuntary manslaughter by a court in Strasbourg. The sentence imposed was as requested by prosecutors in early October in the suicide case of a medical consultant employed by Cnam.
On December 12, 2023, Doctor Catherine Dumas-Pierog, 44, jumped out of a window from the 3rd floor of a health insurance office in Strasbourg, hours after receiving her schedule for the following month. In a report sent to the public prosecutor in October 2024, the Labor Inspectorate assessed that the medical officer had been the victim of manslaughter committed by his employer.
The report noted that after the new organization and implementation of new software, victims found themselves alone “overwhelmed by work”. “I can’t improve, I can’t adapt, I can’t take it anymore, I’m desperate, I’m sorry”he wrote in a handwritten note left on his desk, according to the Labor Inspectorate.
Two weeks before Doctor Dumas-Pierog’s action, occupational medicine had warned its hierarchy about it “non-compliance with the employer’s obligations within the framework of the general principle of prevention”.
“Justice recognizes that Cnam is responsible for the absence of adequate psychosocial welfare guarantees” from an employee, commented Laurent Paté, defender of the CFDT Social Protection Federation, the civil party in the trial. But “Doctor Dumas-Pierog’s work accident cannot be considered a local, isolated act” warned the Labor Inspectorate, also mentioning a “attempted suicide by a manager” in the Paris Social Security service.
In 2021, work reorganization is also the subject of warnings established by the mentioned occupational medicine “the suffering of many employees in the workplace caused by vertical management”.
For Laurent Paté, the decision of the Strasbourg court “This is an important decision because there is very little case law dealing with cases like this”. In fact, in the 2000s, a suicide case at France Telecom, now Orange, occurred “make headlines” and already describes the problem of moral harassment.
