This article contributes to debates on the conditions for strengthening collective worker voice in financialized organizations. It examines change in employment relations at France Télécom/Orange (FT) following a social crisis associated with employee suicides in 2007–2009. FT’s labor unions developed creative approaches to study and publicize the negative effects of employment restructuring on workers’ psychosocial health. The common framing they developed became a source of ‘communicative power’, used to influence how the suicides were interpreted both within the firm and in the media. This power was deployed to encourage substantive social dialogue that institutionalized worker participation in management decision-making. Findings demonstrate the potentially transformative role of discursive strategies that assert the legitimacy of worker well-being as both a measure of and input to organizational performance.

In this article we examine work reorganisation in technician units at France Télécom (FT/Orange) following the social crisis associated with employee suicides in 2007–2009. As a result of trade union campaigns and changes in leadership, the company moved to a more collaborative model, relying on broadened skills and enhanced worker participation in decision-making. Drawing on the framework of organisational and institutional experimentation, we argue that the crisis provided an opportunity to shift from top-down, Taylorised practices to a high-involvement model based on multi-skilled teams. This new model fostered mutual gains for workers in terms of increased autonomy and broadened skills, and for the employer through improved efficiency and customer service. It was underpinned, however, by the strengthening of labour’s countervailing power following the social crisis, which encouraged and supported managers in prioritising psychosocial health as a key organisational objective.

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