The former HR department had unknowingly and illegally registered 180 Vinci Autoroutes employees, including around ten Girondin employees based in Coutras.
A former Vinci HR director was sentenced on Monday October 2 to six months in prison before the Brive-la-Gaillarde court in Corrèze, in a guilty plea procedure, for having registered employees and keeping a table with annotations like “lazy, mythologian, spoiled child”France Bleu Gironde learned.
It was the Médiapart site which revealed the scandal in 2020. The former employee unknowingly and illegally registered 180 employees in the Centre-Auvergne region of the Vinci Autoroutes group, including around ten employees based in Coutras (Gironde) . On an Excel file found on her computer, she had noted comments such as “lazy, mythologian, spoiled child” or “union elected official, it’s not possible to fire him, suspicion of alcoholism, poor lifestyle”reports France Bleu Gironde.
“It’s humanly degrading”
With the guilty plea procedure, the former HR director will thus avoid a public trial. His six-month suspended prison sentence, without entry in the criminal record, was therefore pronounced in the office of a magistrate in Brive-la-Gaillarde. “When we see the number of people who are affected by this file, when we see how the assessments are held up, it’s impressive. It’s degrading humanly, personally from every point of view”estimates Maître François Ruffié, lawyer for Girondin employees.
But the case is not yet over because the lawyers of around a hundred Vinci employees are now requesting the referral of the case on civil interests. According to them, Vinci must also be condemned, the HR department acted as a fuse. Maître François Ruffié reports annotations which prove that the group was involved in this practice of carding: “‘So-and-so is going to give us sick leave because we refused her Christmas leave’, that’s information that HR was only able to obtain from information provided by the group.”
“It is quite unethical that it is she who alone assumes all these damages, it would seem normal that her employer should put her hand in her pocket.”
Master François Ruffiéin France Bleu Bordeaux
The lawyers are demanding that the large group pay compensation to illegally registered employees. “The employees consider that she did not do it on her own initiative, but on instructions or at least in the service of her employer, Vinci”recalls the employees’ lawyer.