Deregulation and Privatization

The end of the Second World War saw the company AT&T in a dominant position in the US. They had the local monopoly, the long-distance monopoly, and the manufacturing monopoly. They were under constant attack by the Justice Department who sought to stop their monopoly position by applying the Anti-Trust laws. In 1984 they succeeded, and the AT&T empire was dissolved. Seven independent, so-called Baby Bells, were set up. Bell Telephone Laboratories, the world’s greatest research laboratory, was split up. In the UK at about the same time the Post Office lost its monopoly position, although British Telecom, set up in its stead, was allowed to keep a monopoly position but had to accept regulation. France Telecom was also privatized.

Orange on the Inside

Chapter four examines the suicide crisis at France Télécom, situating this in the shift to a new finance-driven management model, following the company’s privatisation, whereby the search for shareholder value became the overarching strategic goal of the company. I draw on scholarship on financialisation and in particular, the rise of shareholder value, examining its impact on the changing status and conditions of labour. Suicides were not an aberration in an otherwise smooth-functioning system, but the consequence of systemic processes that sought to remove labour from the workplace as an obstacle to extraneous financial goals. The chapter examines the structural transformations of the company which transformed the perceived value of the individual worker and considers the new expulsionary management tactics that characterised the Next restructuring plan. The chapter draws on testimonial material, including suicide letters and witness statements drawn from a legal case taken by a work inspector against the company in 2010 which culminated in the recent criminal trial against the company’s former bosses. An analysis of this testimonial material allows us to reconstruct the causal connections that link structural transformations in the company to the acute suffering that triggered an act of self-killing.

Glamorous Acquisitions in Telecommunications after the Market Liberalisation: Success or Failure?

The academic literature indicates that “glamour” influences the investor’s behaviour. This article analyses the performance and value creation of the glamorous operations of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the telecommunications sector, trying to understand if these operations are conducive to stockholder wealth maximization. To conduct this analysis, the telecommunications M&A that occurred in the convulsed period of the internet bubble were counted as samples (1995–2010). The research concludes that glamour tends to be opposite to value creation in the long run: the glamour firms show significant value destruction and worse performance than non-glamour firms. Certain acquirers’ characteristics, such as size, are determinant in the glamour behaviour. This paper combats the shortage of research of a quantitative sectoral nature on telecommunications M&As, when leading international companies like Vodafone, Cable and Wireless, France Telecom or Telecom Italia are very active in this kind of operations.

After the social crisis: the transformation of employment relations at France Télécom

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.