“Workers at L’Oréal are Disposable”
CEO Nicholas Hieronimus says remote work is bad for employees.
Nicholas Hieronimus sent 88,000 people back to work during 2020 which was before the height of the pandemic. Before the four thousand people a day died and were stored in freezer trucks behind hospitals. He believes in the serendipity and synergy, potentially infected, possibly dying workers, can bring to the office.
“In January 2024, L’Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus said that remote work is bad for employees’ mental health. Hieronimus also said that remote workers have “absolutely no attachment, no passion, no creativity”.
Hmm. Working from home is bad for my mental health? The quiet harms my creativity? Not dealing with unpleasant employees diminishes my passion? Not having to be in the office somehow removes my attachment to the company? (Let me assure you, nothing in your office has my attachment besides the need to work there for money.)
Let’s ask this a different way:
• Does my office show any attachment to me as a worker?
• Or am I as disposable as an office chair?
• Where is the passion for the worker?
• Where is the celebration of our value to the company?
• What about my organization’s creativity toward me?
• Are companies bending over backward to find creative ways to reward me for the long, thankless hours solving problems for their company?
While we are asking questions:
• What about my physical health?
• What about my physical safety?
• What about my pandemic safety?
• What about the shockwaves of death, destruction and debilitation sweeping through our society which NO ONE is talking about?
Even now, the only thing we hear is about how important it is to return to work. How we need to keep those office buildings full to 94% capacity. How we need to keep the centers of our metropolitan areas humming with commerce from trapped workers spending an average of $50 a day to GO to work…
Morris, Chris, and Jane Thier. 2023. “Returning to the Office Is Costing You $51 per Day, Study Finds.” Fortune. Fortune. October 11, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/10/11/return-to-office-costs-commuting-lunch/.
Companies aren’t asking:
• Are you ready for work?
• Are you okay? Did you experience any loss during the pandemic?
• How do you feel about going back to the office?
• Are you worried about your safety from the coronavirus, still running free in our maskless, self-centered, society?
Has your office done anything to make you safer than the pre-pandemic shitshow that most offices were before the world went to hell?
I am confident the CEO of L’Oreal knows little of his employee’s mental health, having them working during the height of the pandemic without having made any accommodations for their health, safety or security of his employee’s work areas.
Mental health? You mean the psychological state of his employees after discovering the nation has been affected by a highly-infectious, contagious, airborne disease travel around the world, running almost unchecked in the US due to misinformation.
That more people have died from COVID in the US than the opioid crisis — which has killed, from 1999–2021 — nearly 645,000 people have died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids. An average of 30,000 people a year. That more people died from COVID than Vietnam in a single year? In the year 2020, more than 1.8 million people worldwide would die from the disease.
Conservative estimates in the United States put that number at 900,000 but the excess deaths estimate by December 2020 was 1.3 to 1.6 million estimated deaths in the United States alone. (This is the same year, the CEO of L’Oreal, Nicolas Hieronimus, said all of his workers MUST return to the office no matter how they felt about it. Return or quit was the choice.)
COVID flattens that number as if it weren’t even moving. In the four years we have contended with this virus, the excess deaths in the United States is estimated to be 3.5 million people in the US alone, 25 million worldwide, with millions more survivors of the disease battling “long COVID” — a lasting sickness which can affect the entire body, leaving victims in need of new organs (heart, liver, kidneys, lungs) nervous system destruction, permanent cardiovascular damage, diminished mental capacity and often great physical debilitation.
Not to mention the families devastated by the deaths of their loved ones. Or the millions starving because of lost wages, or the millions of others who have lost their homes due to small and medium job destruction due to losses incurred by the pandemic.
Let us not forget the mental assault the former president bombarded the American people with, his blatant racism, cuddling up to tyrants and despots, trying to become one himself, undermining democracy, threatening Congressional members and even the vice president himself with his soft-core insurrection.
Has the president of this company actually considered what life is like when you are not worth MILLIONS of dollars? Not on a bet. He hasn’t had to struggle to find healthcare in a system overburdened with exhausted nurses and overworked doctors. He hasn’t struggled with putting his kids in school only to discover schools were out due to being one of the fastest vectors for the infection. He probably never noticed any of these things because his wealth insulates him from having to deal with any of these issues up front.
But in case you needed a list, here’s why a lot of folk don’t want to return to the toxic swamp that is THE OFFICE:
If I drive to work:
• I don’t start my day at 5:00 AM. Walking out my door at 6:30 AM.
• I don’t have to carpool to get to work on time.
• I don’t have to drive two hours in highly congested traffic.
• I don’t have to contend with spontaneous road rage from strangers.
• I don’t have to contend with parking my car or paying parking fees.
If I take mass transit:
• I have to get up early and deal with delays due to poor staffing.
• I don’t have to deal with the crowds and inefficiency of mass transit.
• I’m not surrounded by hundreds of unmasked folk in a tight space.
• I don’t have to deal with random mass transit aggression and crime.
Once I get to work, the job gets harder:
• Psychologically-distressed individuals permeate the office environment.
• Stressed people who are unpredictable and often on edge.
• I don’t have to deal directly with micro-aggressions from my manager.
• I don’t have to pretend I am happy to see anyone in the hall.
• I don’t have to contend with small talk I absolutely abhor.
• I don’t have to contend with people’s terrible hygiene or cologne.
• I don’t have to deal with being interrupted every ten minutes.
• I don’t have to take 20 minutes to return to the Zone after interruption.
Working from home:
• I can focus my attention for hours, bringing clarity to my work.
• I make fewer mistakes because I am interrupted less often.
• I am not bothered by fluorescent lighting.
• I do not have to spend $20 for lunch.
• I do not have to wolf my lunch down in 15 minutes at my desk.
• There is no return commute, when I am exhausted.
• I don’t have to re-orient myself to deal with my kids.
• I can use productivity tools which actually improve my productivity.
• Should an idea come to me, I have the tools and inclination to record it.
I am certain the social paradigm of wealthy oligarchs used to minions scrambling underneath their feet for their wealth to continue to flow in his general direction can be a traumatic thing if they suddenly DON’T want to die to make you rich.
It’s understandable if you don’t want to pay for empty buildings, gutted city centers depreciating your building’s value that you paid a twenty year lease on. I can see you being upset.
If only you were as upset when people who work for you, gave the best years of their lives for you. If only you could be as upset knowing that they died along with their institutional knowledge, taking part of your company culture with them to the grave.
If only you could be concerned for the orphans left in your wake, the number of people devastated so that you can keep bringing home your €10.33 million compensation package, including 19.4% salary and 80.6% bonuses, which include company stock and options.
I understand your being worried that your three year tenure might be disrupted due to forces beyond your control. That you might find yourself thrown out by your board because your company’s social issue suffers because of your tyrannical approach and the eventual dissolution of your company as workers realize, they shouldn’t have to risk death to come to work.
I get it.
Maybe you will lose something in the process, some of your wealth, some of your connections, your membership in the Oligarch’s Supper Club, but whatever it is, we don’t have to worry about you losing your humanity.
That ship appears to have sailed, Nicolas Hieronimus.
Remember the company’s new slogan:
“L’Oreal: Because you’re not worth caring about.”
“Many remote workers have ‘absolutely no attachment, no passion, no creativity,’ says L’Oreal CEO”
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Nicolas Hieronimus said “working from home is actually very bad” for workers’ “mental health.”
