Nice Snowjob, Sparky. You Almost had me Sold.

That incredibly stale old saw about how the French work to live,blah, blah, blah, and that Americans live to work, blah, blah, blah, has not only never seemed true to me, but seems like a rather absurd case of whisting past the graveyard when you see just how desperate people get in the near fascistically illiberal European employment market.

Some of the other suicides left notes blaming work conditions. One 52-year-old employee who killed himself in July left a note that blamed "overwork" and "management by terror." "I am committing suicide because of my work at France Telecom," he wrote. "That's the only reason."

As sorry as it is for those it’s effected, it’s strange thing to find when the national party line is that the over-management, narrowness of choices, regimentation, and under-competitiveness is an acceptable price for instituting conditions which are supposed to lend themselves to a higher quality of life for a workforce otherwise also being paid.

As if the idea of just quitting, even in that chaumers paradise was considered worse than ending your life, or otherwise didn’t dawn on them as an option. In more fluid and risk-taking environments, this kind of corporate Seppeku just doesn’t seem to happen.

Closures, Redundancies, Unemployment Cause 'Econocide'

In the face of rising unemployment, business closures and a massive wave of layoffs, the French administration is concerned that the recurring suicides could be seen as evidence that their economic stimulus programs are not working. Politicians and chief executives are proposing a whole row of measures to help ease any stress, tension or conflict that the approximately 100,000 workers at France Telecom may be feeling.

Where Americans largely believe that their employers don’t own them, but rather just rent them, strangely enough, a company really DOES own you in that kind of environment.

Stranger still is the rate of these regrettable suicides at the French telephone company, 13/100 000 per annum is at the same rate per capita as that of the US Army which burdened with the emotional stress of war. It certainly makes the fate of the nearly unfirable French communication worker a rather strange phenomenon.

Shortly after France Télécom was privatized in 1997, the global telecommunications industry started undergoing big changes. The business came under pressure as consumers abandoned predominantly fixed-phone-line services in favor of mobile phones and Internet services.

Still, France Télécom is having more trouble than others cutting costs: 65% of the 100,000 people at the company have civil-servant contracts -- dating to the time when the company was owned by the French state -- and therefore can't be fired.

I put it down to learned helplessness, and the creation of a kind of dependency on the company that if broad and far-reaching in either their intrusion or pandering when it comes to their employees - comparable to that of an out of control welfare states. Slowly, but surely, over the course of decades of building expectations, can convince many that their well being is not really something that they need to take any responsibility over themselves. It also constructs the expectation of a level of trust that a corporate entity can’t provide. If family members have been occasionally been known to let their kin down, how on earth can you expect the telephone company to do better?

The fact is that it’s only a job, not a war. I find it strange that it would take the much lectured and mythologized Americans, living in their supposed worker’s dystopia to tell them this.