Lidl will have to respond to the working conditions of its employees.
The German sign was recently indicted for manslaughter and moral harassment, after the suicide of one of its employees and the burnout of another, according to information from 20 Minutes, that Le Parisien was able to do to confirm.
The facts date back to 2015. That year, on May 29, the body of Yannick Sansonetti was found hanged at his workplace, a warehouse of the Lidl sign in Rousset (Bouches-du-Rhône). A month earlier, Patrice Tonarelli, warehouse manager until 2018 and supervisor of Yannick Sansonetti, had suffered a burnout. The working conditions in this warehouse were highlighted during a report on the program "Cash investigation", broadcast on France 2 in 2017, allowing the opening of a judicial investigation.
During a first civil appeal trial, at the end of which Lidl was sentenced in January 2020 for the suicide of Yannick Sansonetti, as 20 Minutes reminds us, the justice had already pointed out a "very strong managerial pressure since the arrival of 'a new regional director in January 2014 ”, with employees subject to“ an unreasonable daily workload, adding them unpredictable assignments, without giving them suitable working resources ”.
A search in mid-February in Brittany
After the broadcast of the report of "Cash Investigation", about fifty employees of the warehouse of Rousset went on strike, demanding a change in management practices ", the end" of threats and profanity "from supervision, and progress on the way in which the schedules are decided. Lidl, for his part, defended himself the next day, through a press release: “The report broadcast yesterday does not reflect this reality. "" On the issue of management, the extracts unveiled in the show are unacceptable and we condemn them without any ambiguity, "the sign also wrote.
In mid-February, a search was carried out in Lidl's warehouse in Ploumagoar (Côtes-d'Armor), which also houses the regional management of the sign, as part of a judicial investigation for harassment. Nine people, including the regional director, had been taken into police custody.