"When Work Hurts"

Today we are going to address the sensitive theme of suffering at work and which is the subject of our book "When work hurts". This book was not written without difficulty, like any work, my co-authors my friend Olivier Brosseau and my loving husband Grégoire Vitry will not contradict me and will be able to tell you that we can go through ill-being!

 I am very moved this morning to share our work with you and I want to tell Olivier and Grégoire how precious they are to me and how proud I am of our work!! We never say this often enough!!

I come back to you now on our subject, suffering at work.

First of all what are we talking about?

First of all, remember that work is good most of the time, but it can hurt and cause suffering, and when this is the case, what are the symptoms associated with this suffering?

They are diverse and varied as you can see: from emotional outbursts to serious somatizations. And this list is not exhaustive!!

These symptoms have been the subject of concerns for more than years, which have been widely publicized and which have brought to the fore a mental health problem involving the work and no longer just the individual or his personal history. The work would endanger our mental health.

We first had a book on harassment which echoed work situations, parallel to that a wave of suicide from which the management of large companies such as France Telecom, Renault, La Poste, etc. questioned, psychologists have identified somatic stress-related disorders such as musculoskeletal disorders, for example.

Faced with all this, regulations on PSR have been imposed on companies, regulations on harassment have been recorded in the labor code and are subject to criminal sanctions,

In recent weeks, the professional exhaustion syndrome known as burn-out has been the subject of an attempt to be recognized as an occupational disease before parliamentarians but has been rejected for the moment.

So what can we say about suffering at work? It is worrying, it is taken seriously and the question we can ask is the effectiveness of all these measures? Do you manage to control the suffering at work? is it possible to channel the risk of mental illness? do we suffer more? do we suffer less? What are the effects of regulation?

The regulations in question , How do we usually go about trying to solve work-related suffering?

We find that a person is suffering, we make a medical diagnosis, and this is established by a doctor: depression, fatigue, overwork, burnout. And we try to understand why this person is suffering: Why is she in this state? because her work situation makes her suffer: her manager, her colleagues, her objectives, her workload, the organization of work. So we find ourselves with a person who is in bad shape and we name the disease (burnout) or we name the cause of his discomfort (moral harassment). As soon as the diagnosis is established, this person is recognized as ill, victim of a culprit whether it is his manager for example, or more generally the work organization. Obviously the rest of the process will be to establish the recognition of a prejudice suffered and in this case we are moving towards a judicialization of the situation of this person, which will end up sealing the status of victim by justice. But we see that in situations of harassment the guilt of the alleged executioner is rarely established. The consequence is that the presumed executioners must defend themselves from the accusation of which they may be the target - and it works - and the recognized victims find themselves frozen in their victim status. Thus, the more we supervise the difficulties of work by the medical way, the more the legal procedures multiply and the more we create an incapacity to solve the problems of work where the actors of the work of the problematic situations concerned are involved.

As we go about trying to overcome suffering at work, it reinforces pathologization on the one hand and judicialization on the other, but without succeeding in solving the problems of suffering at work. We believe that we have to do things differently if we want to put an end to these questions and stop trying to isolate the problems in a causal approach.

We approach suffering at work differently. For us, suffering at work is linked to a rigidity in the relationship between an individual and his context, which in turn makes this individual suffer and impacts his context. For us it is not the individual who would only be pathological, it is not either the organization that would be only pathological but it is their link that can be Our interventions consist in causing change in this link so that more functional regulations are put in place and soothe suffering. This is what we explain in our book and we will give you an example from the book to illustrate our point.

Olivier I give you the floor!