On 21 May 2018, early in the morning, Julien Pieraut, 27, an employee at SNCF’s Eastern European technical center in Bobigny, was deliberately hit by a train at a level crossing while heading to his job.
The SNCF refused to recognize the professional nature of this suicide and stated that it had never heard of Julien Pieraut’s psychological difficulties due to his professional activity.
However, he lived in Aisne, about two and a half hours’ drive from his workplace. In 2015, he informed his employer of “transport concerns” and then requested a transfer to Picardy the following year, recalls the Court of Appeal of Amiens in its ruling handed down on December 10.
Instead, the SNCF offered him a new assignment at the end of 2017, still in the Paris region, with longer working hours and exposing him to working early in the morning seven days a week.
First instance ruling confirmed
Although this proposal aggravated his travel problems, Julien Pieraut finally accepted this new position, asking in exchange for a salary increase and help finding accommodation closer to his work, requests that went unanswered.
This confirms in all respects a first instance ruling handed down last year, which awarded Julien Pieraut’s parents compensation of 40,000 euros each for their respective moral damage. The SUD-Rail union welcomed this decision.
“Compelling trials”, such as those of the serial suicides at France Télécom or the train accidents in Brétigny (2013) and the TGV Est (2015), “question work, its conditions of execution and its organisations”, the union recalled in a statement. published on Tuesday.
Despite this, “how many files are not opened, they become discouraged, they pile up or in the end they are not recognized,” he lamented. The SNCF, for its part, did not want to comment to AFP about its new conviction on appeal in this case.
Source: BFM TV
