Slashdot Mirror
In France, Fired For Writing To MP Against 3 Strikes
neurone333 sends along the cause célèbre of the moment in France: a Web executive working for TF1, Europe's largest TV network, sends an email to his Member of Parliament opposing the government's "three strikes and you're out" proposal, known as Hadopi. His MP forwards the email to the minister backing Hadopi, who forwards it to TF1. The author of the email, Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, is called into his boss's office and shown an exact copy of his email. Soon he receives a letter saying he is fired for "strong differences with the [company's] strategy" — in a private email sent from a private (gmail) address. French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar. Hit the link below for some background on the ties between TF1 and the Sarkozy government.
The Irish times has an explanation for the incestuous relationship between his government and TF1: "TF1's owner, the construction billionaire Martin Bouygues, is godfather to Mr Sarkozy's youngest son, Louis. Mr. Bouygues suggested to Mr. Sarkozy that he ought to ban advertising on TF1's rival stations in the public sector, which was done in January. Laurent Solly, who was deputy director of Mr. Sarkozy's presidential campaign, is now number two at TF1. Last year, TF1 sacked Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, the station's star presenter for the previous 21 years. Poivre had angered Mr Sarkozy by saying he 'acted like a little boy' at a G8 summit. He was replaced by Laurence Ferrari. Mr. Sarkozy reportedly told Mr. Bouygues he wanted to see the young blond on the news."
The Irish times has an explanation for the incestuous relationship between his government and TF1: "TF1's owner, the construction billionaire Martin Bouygues, is godfather to Mr Sarkozy's youngest son, Louis. Mr. Bouygues suggested to Mr. Sarkozy that he ought to ban advertising on TF1's rival stations in the public sector, which was done in January. Laurent Solly, who was deputy director of Mr. Sarkozy's presidential campaign, is now number two at TF1. Last year, TF1 sacked Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, the station's star presenter for the previous 21 years. Poivre had angered Mr Sarkozy by saying he 'acted like a little boy' at a G8 summit. He was replaced by Laurence Ferrari. Mr. Sarkozy reportedly told Mr. Bouygues he wanted to see the young blond on the news."
He's better off not working for them if:
A) They employ such tactics
B) His beliefs actually do strongly differ with the company's
Now the question is under French law can he sue? If he can, the next question is will it make him less employable suing an ex-employer?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar."
It's not so unheard of outside of France either, believe it or not.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Wow, and I thought our (US) politicians were corrupt... thanks for showing us how it's done, France!
Maybe we can show your newly unemployed web executive how to be a litigious bastard!
It's great to share cultural differences, I feel all warm and fuzzy now!
...freedom fries YOU!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Time for the French to start sharpening the blades on all the old guillotines - the only suitable punishment for Mr Sarkozy and his cronies is a proper beheading.
Really? And how about, say, a US corporation repeatedly found guilty of monopoly abuse and never sentenced to anything but a slap on the wrist? I'm sure slashdotters can come up with dozens of examples!
Just like in any other european country, this lay-off is most certainly illegal and can be appealed by the email's author. That's what labor law is there for.
Of course people got sacked for expressing opposing opinions long before the internet existed. French roots of labor law and freedom of speech date back to the revolution in 1789, UK workers have already fought for those in the 16th century, in Germany those rights have existed before the third reich since the 1849 revolution.
This is not really a "your rights online" article, but should be tagged "your rights in capitalism" - you have them, so use them.
I was once fired through a friend that received the message from my boss through Skype, because I didn't come to work on time. We didn't have a schedule, we agreed verbally that we could come in at whatever time we wanted as long as we were there for eight hours a day. But that's irrelevant, because they had to use proper documents to fire me and they needed proof that I had broken a written agreement or a law and I could have dragged them through courts for years and that would have just destroyed their business, so I just stayed there for a couple of weeks until I found another job.
My understanding (from a friend who works in France) is that in France, if you fire someone, various employee protection laws make you pay a lot more severance benefits than you would in the same situation in the US. For this reason French companies are much more careful about their hiring practices, and there are some French workers who stick around as parasites, working the absolute minimum necessary, because it doesn't pay for the company to fire them.
So this guy probably will get a lot of severance pay even if he doesn't sue.
Of course, I don't live there and so this information might be out-of-date or incomplete.
TF1 had no legal right to sack the guy. This has been pretty much agreed on in all the comments.
As a result of him being fired, what was only a polite message to his MP urging opposition to the proposal has become part of a fairly significant national news story which clearly paints the media as the bad guys and those opposing the law as the innocent victims.
TF1 really cocked this one up.
. . . he only got fired, instead of being shot. In countries with a "State News Agency," The press is just another department of the government anyway. Criticizing the government may be hazardous to your health, but the journalists know that, and would never dare to do so.
Here it seems to be an indirect "family" relationship, in the Soprano sense of the word, which the poor journalist didn't know about.
I don't think you'll be hearing much criticism of Sarkozy on TF1 any more.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They fired him for "public statements;" but as far as I can tell, he never made any public statements, he only wrote, privately, to his MP.
This kind of incident is great for us fighting this law; it produced some more ammos for the opposition in parliament, and it made the gov't look like the assholes they are.
On top of that, it's proof positive -- if it was ever needed -- of the collusion between the gov't and the major media.
Not only our beloved president banned advertising on channel of the public sector but, with the same bill, the executive power (understand Sarkozy himself) is now in charge of dismissal and appointment of the CEO of the public television and radio.
Forwarding a private letter to a third party is a giant privacy violation, I hope he will sue and win against his previous employer and the ministers that forwarded his emails. A good lawyer should be able to secure him some good money and give the cause a good publicity.
Hey, let's can the CEO of GM, just for starters!
Although Americans may be unfamiliar with the entanglements of government and business, many of us are accustomed to being "at-will" employees, which means we can be terminated for any reason or no reason at all, as long as it isn't discriminatory. The bigger story here would be that the elected official passed the message along. Hopefully the incident would be fresh enough in memory to oust them at the next election.
Why has no one suggested he file charges of unauthorized copying of his e-mail?
How is this any different than in most states in the USA, which have "at-will" employment where an employee can apparently be fired for any reason that isn't illegal?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I am not surprised at all ! After all what else could be expected from from Mr. Sarkozy and his bullshit government ? I hope the poor guy who got fired appeals, hell, I even hope he makes millions in compensation and I don't even know him. This sort of attitude is spreading like a virus and if it is not stopped in its tracks soon enough it will become common practice all over the place. In my opinion this is a scandal that deserves some serious public exposure.
Even if it is not illegal under French law it almost certainly is something you could take to the European court of human rights since EU law takes precedence over national laws.
. . . by all the Young Libertarians who gasp at any criticism of greed, and believe there is no greater freedom than being spread face down and legs apart by the Benevolent Corporations.
No, this is not a case for the "EU Court of Justice" but the "European Court of Human Rights".
One is a part of the EU, the other is a non-EU Pan-European court for the European Human Rights Convention.
And the ECHR court does not accept cases that have not been tried all the way to the top in the domestic system. And even then it has to be the last option for the plaintiff.
Hey, they thanked the US for the inspiration a long time ago!
Remember, they sent that statue to New York to remind you how much they liked your ideals.
P.S. The French don't use the Anglo-American Common Law system, so the similarities end here (with regards to litigation).
.
In these hard times it seems that corruption is the rule, not the exception.
Btw, does many of you folks know this website ?
Nice selection of Tech related breaking news
http://www.infowars.com/category/science-technology/
The previous head of the national oil company, Eivind Reiten, privately submitted a view to the EU that he thought private interests should be able to buy property rights to waterfalls.
This is heavily against the ruling Labour Party's politics, and their council representative Jan Bohler said in an interview that they were going to get rid of him for that reason. He is now gone.
It's a funny state and funny state of mind when the government considers itself rightfully able to remove business leaders who don't agree with their politics.
I'm French, I like my President, I like his government, and I hate this Hadopi cr*p.
Also let's hope that the firing is just the decision of his *sshole boss, not some order or recommendation from above, as I still like to believe that freedom of speech happens in my country (actually, it's unevenly allowed or toleratedâ¦)
This line concerns me:
Soon he receives a letter saying he is fired for "strong differences with the [company's] strategy" â" in a private email sent from a private (gmail) address.
this isn't an official email address, I personally would just personally turn up to work and if they asked me about any email I would say I haven't received anything official. But I like to cause trouble.
So what? Don't work in France.
That's what the French do.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
. . . to the left or the right . . . it makes a full circle over the top and lands back on the other side. Too much socialism turns into fascism; too much fascism turns into socialism.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What he did was to make it plain that General Motors would not be considered for further TARP funding if they continued to utilize the services of the CEO who bankrupted the company in the first placed.
Perfectly acceptable here in the United States. Note that there has not been a popular revolt or backlash against this. Evidently, President Obama's action in causing GM to ditch their loser of a CEO was (apparently) neither illegal nor immoral in the opinion of the majority of United States citizens.
(Incidentally, until recently I was a Republican. I actively disapprove of many of the things our current President advocates. This particular example isn't one of them)
Do we really know the history of this guy's relationship with his employer and all the issues surrounding his dismissal? Do we [foolishly] think we know?
Looks like little more than another Those-Stupid-French-People stories. They've been especially popular over the past few years.
You know...like the French enact unpopular laws in the middle of the night so nobody is awake to stop them. Slashdot story. Subsequent Story: Maybe French Not So Stupid.
In business meetings over the past few years, I heard numerous stories, comments, joke about The Stupid French. It amazed me that well-educated people, who would never make such derogatory remarks about any other race or ethnicity, felt no reservation about trash-talking French people (you know...France, Quebec, Them). As amazing was that I never encountered anybody other than myself who found the stories inappropriate or offensive for a business environment.
Bigotry is more insidious than most of us realize.
We all argue over what is obviously obvious, like an obvious troll. Its the rich and powerful getting rid of any reason to change their totalitarian stance. Franklin said this, Obama did that, who even cares anymore? Like anything we do will ever change our lost power to a very small few who own us. Now that he lost his job, he won't ever be heard by the world again, since he can not manipulate the big brother machine from outside.
****Trying to understand and learn, all the time.****
They have raised commercial corruption of the government to an art form. Have you not been paying attention for the past 10 years?
you had me at #!
"French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar."
it's actually increasingly familiar. our government now owns the largest car manufacturer in the US, along with their biggest union. So now Ford has to negotiate with a competitor for their employees. genius.
Someone was actually allowed to be fired in France.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
He's probably loving it.
In France, if you get fired, legally you're entitled to 80% of your wage for 2 years, paid by your employer.
There are thousands of civil servants that hope that each day they'll be sacked, so they can kick back and have a 2 year holiday.
Where in Paris was he? I gotta go crash his party!
I'm not French but I live in France.
The e-mail author (and most comments here on Slashdot) assumed his e-mail was private correspondence (which is usually the case in French and EU law). However, the e-mail to the MPs is *not* private, since what MPs do, read, communicate is by default public (thus making bribery, unlawful conduct and other potential crimes and misdemeanors at least harder to hide).
Thus being said, it is clear the MP in cause was not guilty of anything when she redirected the e-mail message to the author of HADOPI law, i.e. the French Ministry of Culture.
The Ministry of Culture sough to find out why somebody from the TF1, on of the biggest pushers for HADOPI, would push his MP in a different direction than the company he's working for (it's a legitimate question; imagine if a GM welder *publicly* asks for the foreclosure of GM - in such situation there would be nothing wrong for the TARP guys to ask GM what's going on).
Until here I see no evil.
Now, TF1 is not selling bricks or clothes. It's selling cultural products and opinions (plus news). Therefore, having a dissenting opinion to the corporate one, in a business of selling opinions & cultural products, clearly incensed TF1 management. On this case, I say they were right.
BUT, based on their anger, TF1 decided to terminate the employment of this guy. That's something I can't agree, yet in my opinion they should be allowed to do it.
Now, before being chopped off by the liberal wing of /. (i.e., 99%), let me point it's all a non-issue. In France NOBODY can be fired (not until they do something so terrible it makes news in Afghanistan or Somalia, anyway). Therefore this guy will certainly keep his job at TF1.
One last thing: the original author mentioned in his "private" e-mail that he's working at TF1 (that's how they were able to finally trace him down). It seems to me he was ready to add his job as a weight to his e-mail, yet when the weight went against himself he was pissed. Doesn't make much sense to me.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
As in, good luck finding a situation where someone had their rights violated and NO ONE in America cares about it. If you think that's possible, you're an idiot.
The US is too diverse politically for that to ever happen.
As an aside, you're obviously seething with your inability to force the hand of the US government. It must piss you off intensely to know that not only do we not give a fuck what your farcical "world courts" think, but that you can't do a thing to change it.
Whine away, whiny whiner, whine away.
The issue is not whether the mail was not supposed to be forwarded, the issue is whether he made actual public statements. He sent an email to one person, Mme. de Panafieu; that's not "public," regardless of whether she, in turn, publicizes it.
The left-right political spectrum is not so useful given the diversity and disparity of modern political systems. Socialism and Fascism are in no conceivable way incompatible. They are not opposites. Indeed the peculiar character of true socialism lends itself startlingly well to fascist ideals.
Fascism is the political ideology that states society is at its strongest, and ergo its best, when all people work together. There is an old Roman metaphor that people are like twigs, scattered on the ground they may be easily trampled, but bound tightly together in a bundle they are strong and may resist outside threats. Fascism tends to marginalize minority opinions, and are known to promote nationalism or racism as fundamental to societal unity. Fascist states also tend to be preoccupied with fear of citizen uprisings, and often employ propaganda and domestic surveillance to ensure a population remains within a docile-supportive range.
Socialism is an economic system whereby the government takes ownership of the means of production. The means are then leased back to the people with the oversight of government to ensure the best use of a society's resources. Socialism may either give the means of control over to a democratic body that takes the opinions of the people into account when planning the economy, or to a body like the Communist Party in Soviet Russia, a fascist group if ever there was one.
Fascism = one party, or as the Germans so eloquently put it: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!
Socialism = the government owns the means of production, all citizens are government workers
Marx said that after capitalism gorged itself into ruination, it would be replaced by socialism. In other words, the people would rise up and regulate the economy to avoid a society in which the creation of a bourgeois class was institutionally inevitable. His description was an oversimplification, with the government outright owning the means of production rather than merely regulating corporate practice, of what is going on in modern day Europe.
Marx said nothing about the structure of the government that would own the means of production, the notion of a uniform Communist Party was an addition made by Lenin and, to a greater extent, Stalin. It is from Stalin that we get the concept of "political correctness," which is Joe's day meant the most rigorous and logical interpretation or application of the writings of Marx and other Communist dogma.
Anyway, poli-sci lecture over, I just want to attempt to clarify the essential truth you have hit upon with more precise language.
Fanaticism may dress in many different suits, but it always smells like bullshit.
Damage awards in most matters are usually a few orders of magnitude less than in the US, but labor law is one of the exceptions; probably because there is so little protection in the US to begin with.
In this case he could get a year or two's worth of wages, tax free.
The first forward was kosher IMO, part of the job of the MP's staff is to route the questions they get to the appropriate authorities.
What's REALLY dodgy however is the 2nd forward, because unless we learn something completely new about this situation, the motivation was purely punitive. I don't know what kind of law was broken here, it's unclear at this point.
It's been times and times again considered a disguised for a firing. The courts are not stupid, and in particular they really don't like it when someone is trying to bamboozle them.
You can't fire people easily in Germany or Japan either. That's why their cars suck. Oh wait.
You sue for wrongful termination, the court says they shouldn't have fired you, so they have to re-hire you. It would be too much trouble so they pay a nice sum instead.
motivated by what?
The US had more oil deals than France to begin with, and they have all of them now. Plus they killed a million people.
But hey.
Françoise de Panafieu
"Corporations are a danger to liberty only if they control politicians and get laws changed against liberty."
He must not have read this report nor this wonderful letter with the accompanying corp slimes listing....
And now a word about our economy
You know, about the US' stated premise for war being a brazen lie that was eventually admitted to by Bush. Oh wait no, look over there, quick, before we Americans admit any wrongdoing! Look, look! France had a few minor oil contracts with Iraq! Shhhh don't say anything about our interests, shh, quiet, FREEDOM FRIES! US IS THE BEST! YEEAAAAH! (just pretend those WMD really existed and we'll be fine, yah, yah...)
Because it makes the segment of Americans who have never gone overseas, and who are scared shitless at the direction their country's taken, feel better by being able to point to a nebulous entity that, in their minds, is "socialist Europe", and spout ill-informed tropes about bad plumbing, terrible quality of life, and, oh, that whole "evil socialism" thing. And how those spoiled, cowardly, snooty Yer'peens are gonna get their due, oh yeah! In so doing, these scared-shitless Americans feel immensely better about themselves. Thus, to them, it is "insightful".
(Please note that I specified a segment of Americans and defined that segment. Thank you. Also, I'm American.)
Although some would characterize as "free speech" threatening hate mail, most governments take interest in it when directed against senior officials.
It seems that the guy who transmitted the mail to TF1 has given his resignation which has been refused by the minister. He only gets a one month suspension...
I'm a french guy living in China, and I'm really interested in USA, it's laws and politics.
You know what? I feel like neither USA or France are now able to say that China is a dictatorship. It's not more a dictatorship than the 2 above countries now. There's a very limited freedom of press in France (see the affair between Francois Perol and the online newspaper Mediapart), our president is taking decision on his own, and he is above any laws. In USA, people are all enslaved by the bankers, a private central bank.
What makes France and USA being the same now, is that in both countries, presidents are liars.
The incestuous relationship is even weirder than one can imagine. Last year the Chief of the office of the Minister of Culture - the one ran by Christine Albanel no less, the Minister who is passing this hadopi law - was found dead in the appartment of the chief of TF1 international after having consumed a coctail of cocaine and ghb - known as a rape drug according to reports.
"French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar."
Not for long.