All employees are free to leave... That does not excuse misconduct by managers or violations of law. But the specific outcome here, I. s. suicide, is fiendishly difficult link to any one cause.
The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?
This is, in essence, the argument that the CEO made, during the crisis and at the trial. He kept saying (paraphrasing here) that there was no statically significant increase in the rate of suicides, and because the company was so huge it was bound to have employees killing themselves from time to time, regardless of what management did or didn't do. According to him, the whole affair was a pure media campaign orchestrated by people who disagreed with his management of the company.
The incredibly insensitive delivery of this argument cost the man his job years ago. The immense grief of families and coworkers, the fact that the suicides appeared to be work-related (and sometimes even happening at the workplace), the scathing reports by medical inspectors seemed all irrelevant to the dude, who basically just looked at this as a statistic to be managed. His lack of public displays of empathy or desire for introspection was pretty disturbing.
You're literally saying "This job is a necessary part of our society, and while you personally might not want to tolerate the {harassment/low pay/terrible conditions}, someone else has to."
Those jobs were civil servants with lifetime job guarantee in what was, at the time of hiring, a public company.
Of course the whole question is how to transition to private company with private employment, but that doesn’t cancel the fact that civil servants had made serious concessions to get a lifetime job (lower grade than what they could get in the private sector after their diploma, in exchange for lifetime security), which artificially put them in a weak negotiation position (few savings, mental dedication to only one speciality).
I don’t think it is. The problem with that statement is that leaving a country is a huge transition, with plenty of costs, and unclear rewards.
Leaving a job is sometimes a big deal, but it’s never as serious. One could argue that the more serious it is for your the greater the problem in question is because you don’t have any skills deemed valuable by your current employer or potential employers.
What to do with useless white collar labor is a hard problem. Mistreating people is a bad idea, but you need to do “something” otherwise you’ll eventually just go out of business if firing them is not an option.
A foundational text of sociology is Durkheim's Suicide, based precisely on the premise that the act itself is undeniable, that bodies are very hard to hide, and that the motivations, if not an extreme of altruism, are an extreme of either loss of social context (individuation), or complete hopelessness (fatalism).
Suicide has been chosen as its subject, among the various subjects that we have had occasion to study in our teaching career, because few are more accurately to be defined.... Suicide as it exists today is precisely one of the forms through which the collective affection from which we suffer is transmitted; thus it will aid us to understand this.... [I]n common terms, suicide is pre-eminently the desperate act of one who does not care to live.
Moreover, of population suicide rates:
Not only is this rate constant for long periods, but its invariability is even greater than that of leading demographic data.
That is, deviations from norm are intrinsically significant.
The usual standard for negligence is something like “resonantly foreseeable”, but even that isn’t particular useful in this case: with enough employees, you could probably always avoid at least one suicidal by, say, doubling wages. So where’s the limit?