Book Review: Sarah Waters, Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France
Work, Employment and Society
William Fleming
Sociologists have long been concerned with the harm wage labour inflicts on workers. The causes of this harm are various: through working conditions set by law and managers, or bullying and exclusion from colleagues and coworkers. Its effects can be severe, even fatal. Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France details the epidemic of work suicide across French workplaces in recent decades, examining its causes, cultural depictions and contested narratives.
Work suicide is a highly controversial topic, often receiving significant mainstream media attention when it occurs. Readers may recall dark rumours of safety netting around Apple–Foxconn facilities in China, or in the UK more recently the Post Office Horizon scandal or Ofsted’s acknowledged contribution to Ruth Perry’s death. In France, where workplace suicide is legally classed as a workplace accident, rates are estimated to be far higher than elsewhere. Waters’ aim is to explain why, contextualising the deaths of hundreds of workers in a story of marketisation, work intensification and the erosion of labour resistance. For Waters, workplace suicide is, simultaneously, the most extreme instance of work-based harm caused by brutal marketisation of former public service companies, and a final act of resistance left to workers amid the decline of collective labour. Suicide Voices narrates the hopelessness of work exploitation in neoliberal corporations through suicide notes, written testimonies of deceased workers, as well as documentation from the legal and media fallout.
