One night in February 2007, a technician at Renault crafted a noose in his two-bedroom apartment in the village of Saint-Cyr-l’École, outside Paris, and hanged himself. The technician left behind a wife and young son, who had gone out of town and expected him to meet them the next day. His suicide was unexpected in many ways. He had a loving relationship with his family, and his work should have been equally satisfying. The position at Renault was a dream job—he had been obsessed with cars as a youth and had worked at the company since 1992, and Renault was putting him through graduate school for engineering. His performance reviews were consistently positive, and he was on track to be promoted to engineer.

But in the months before he died, the technician, Raymond D., had been sliding into an emotional abyss, largely because of pressures at work. (Under French law, the last names of suicide victims are not disclosed without the approval of family members.) The company was in the midst of a radical turnaround plan implemented by Carlos Ghosn, who had taken over as C.E.O. in 2005. As a result, the workload had steadily increased for all of Renault’s employees, particularly those at the design center where Raymond was employed. Workdays became longer and deadlines more intense. Before he killed himself, Raymond left a note on his son’s blackboard that said, among other things, “Tell Mr. Ghosn I can’t handle the pressure anymore.” (View a pop-up graphic showing notable groups of business-related suicides.)

Raymond was not alone. Between October 2006 and February 2008, six employees working at the company’s design complex—a campus called the Technocentre—and one at its nearby test facility tried to kill themselves; five succeeded, three of them during a period of just four months. Particularly gruesome were the two deaths that occurred at the complex itself. It’s possible that this is just a statistical anomaly—Renault is a huge company, with more than 63,000 employees in France and 12,000 at the Technocentre alone. Peugeot Citroën, another French car manufacturer, has also experienced a handful of suicides. But some of the Renault employees who killed themselves blamed workplace pressure as the main cause. And one, Raymond, went a step further and blamed Ghosn, the man brought in to save the company.

Renault, the third-largest automaker in Europe, made no immediate public comment on Raymond’s death, or on any of the others. No one from management called his widow to offer condolences. But as news of the suicides at Renault became public and experts posited that such a cluster in one facil­ity was unusual, the questions surrounding the deaths became harder for the company to ignore. Job-related suicides are particularly rare in France, where strict worker protections such as 35-hour workweeks are enforced and labor unions have ample input into plant activities. Yet the turnaround plan at Renault was extremely ambitious and involved releasing 26 new or redesigned cars in less than four years, a pace far faster than most auto companies can sustain. 

“I am trying to motivate people to want to do more than they thought they could do,” says Ghosn, 54, in an interview at his office in Boulogne-Billancourt, the Paris suburb where the company is headquartered. He is short and stocky, dark-eyed, and impeccably dressed in a tailored black suit. “That’s the most important role of a manager, and that’s what I appealed to when I began the transformation at Renault. I was certain that everybody in the company would feel that they were doing something extraordinary by helping Renault achieve what we set out to accomplish.” Moments later, though, reflecting on the suicides of Raymond and his colleagues, Ghosn adds, “But if you say people’s motivation is the greatest wealth and asset of the company, scenes like these cannot be ignored.”

The events at Renault raise larger questions about how far a company is able to push its workers. At a time when the global economy is sagging, most large corporations are trying to increase their productivity. This involves painful initiatives that can backfire, especially in countries with worker-friendly ­labor laws. Most restructuring efforts follow a predictable pattern: reduced budgets, layoffs among well-trained workers, and new ­operations in cheaper parts of the world. In the process, says Kaj Grichnik, a consultant at Booz & Co., manufacturers are alienating themselves from their most critical asset: their employees. “In ­exchange for working harder and harder, most manufacturers offer their workers static salaries, decreasing benefits, increasing anonymity, and abuse from middle managers,” Grichnik says. “And when workers feel that they ­are not being treated with respect, the company suffers.”