A former employee accuses his former company of having voluntarily put him in the closet, which would have plunged him into a serious state of depression.
Boredom. The French courts are examining this Monday a case of “bore-out”, terminology which designates professional exhaustion linked to the absence of activity, to “placardization”. An evil with the causes opposite to “burn-out”, but with paradoxically similar effects.
A French employee thus assigns his company to the Paris industrial tribunal. The 44-year-old was fired in September 2014 after a seven-month sick leave. He had worked for eight years at the French company Interparfums, which specializes in licensing luxury perfumes.
” Nightmare “
Frédéric Desnard was responsible for general services where he took care of logistical and administrative tasks. According to him, the company would have put it in the closet following “the loss of a big contract for the company and a restructuring to come”, he explains to AFP. He says he was suddenly ostracized, losing all his powers, having “no more tasks” to perform, his “friends” becoming “his enemies”.
The former employee evokes his “putting in the closet” as an “insidious descent into hell, a nightmare”, which would be the cause of “serious health problems: epilepsy, ulcer, sleep disorders, severe depression”. “I was depressed, I was ashamed of being paid to do nothing (…). The most terrible thing is the negation of this suffering ”.
For his lawyer, the shelving took place intentionally on the part of his ex-employer, who would have wanted to push his employee to resign, so as not to have to pay him severance pay.
“Defamation”
The defense, it rejects this version and intends to demonstrate the “inconsistencies” and “the absence of evidence”. She recalls that the man was convicted in 2015 for “defamation”, the justice evoking a “personal animosity on his part towards society”.
Interparfums’ lawyer is also surprised that the complainant has “never come forward, either by email or by mail, to the company to express his ill-being”. According to him, he would have even “changed his argument over time, speaking first of burn-out, professional exhaustion by overactivity, then from 2015 only, of bore out”.
According to AFP, “bore-out” cases brought to justice are quite frequent. The Court of Cassation is said to have rendered nearly 250 judgments linked to shelving or cases of “intentional professional disqualification”, considered to be a form of moral harassment.
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