From Individual Tragedy to Institutional Moral Harassment: Endogenous Legal Mobilization for Constructing Employer Accountability in Workplace Deaths by Suicide

Scholars have demonstrated how managerial elites circumvent legal mandates through symbolic compliance, decoupling, or regulatory capture. Yet less is known about how labor and occupational activists resist this weakening of laws within organizations, as most legal mobilization research focuses on labor and social movements’ exogenous strategies to target organizations (lobbying for regulations or using litigation). Drawing on archival data, we explore a union-led movement that started inside France Telecom to hold the company and its executives accountable after the 2008–2009 deaths by suicide of dozens of employees. We show how this movement was able to document and counter managerial strategies to weaken anti-harassment law and how this endogenous legal mobilization ended up transforming the interpretation of nationwide laws. We argue that this endogenous legal mobilization is an understudied aspect of legal mobilization and may be a crucial component in explaining the outcomes of subsequent legal mobilization. This helps demonstrate how insider activists (such as occupational activists or union activists) use multi-sited legal strategies to reinforce pre-existing laws and hold organizational elites accountable, through mobilizations that start within companies. Our concept of endogenous legal mobilization contributes to both labor and occupational activism literature by stressing an understudied aspect of these activists’ tactical repertoire.