This is the third suicide of a Banque de France employee in a few months. And even if nothing suggests, at this stage, that a professional reason is at the origin of this gesture, the unions intend to request an investigation, AFP learned on Tuesday from reliable sources.
In a press release, the CGT, the central bank’s leading union, wishes to broaden the investigations and “requests an investigation into all suicides of colleagues since 2019”. ” We count [également] request an investigation to clarify the causes” of this third suicide, confirmed to AFP Frédéric Pianet, elected representative of the National Autonomous Union of Staff of the Bank of France (SNABF-Solidaires), the bank’s second union.
Expertise in progress
“The information available to us at this stage seems to show that no professional alert had been noted,” specifies an internal note from the Banque de France communicated to employees on Tuesday. “We can sometimes have doubts, there it seems only to be for personal reasons”, declared to AFP Yannick Guillemaud, member of SNABF-Solidaires and staff representative on the General Council, the equivalent of a council of administration, of the bank.
Three weeks earlier, the unions had decided to launch an expertise after two employee suicides in June, one of which directly pointed out in a letter the share of responsibility of his employer.
A “well-being at work” plan
The governor had at the same time announced the launch of a so-called “Well-being at work” action program, according to him “more useful than voting for a union alert across the entire Bank”. This plan, which must involve management, agents and elected staff representatives, will begin with surveys in all the group’s professions and will include a component on workload.
The CGT criticized this plan in its press release, which it considers to be “a counter-expertise at the hands of management”, while Mr. Pianet, of SNABF-Solidaires, hopes that there will be “complementarity” between the two expertises and that this plan “will lead to concrete things”.