The Court of Appeal in Douai, France has confirmed that an Adecco Group Director in France has been convicted over the death of two temporary workers.

According to 20minutes.fr, the manager’s conviction is for the offense of obstructing the operation of the health and safety committee (CHSCT). According to the court, the director, Pierre Lombard, will be fined €18,000, furthermore his request not to see this conviction entered in the criminal record was rejected.

The case stems from two separate accidents in 2012 when two temporary workers hired by the Adecco Group in France died in a work and in a commuting accident, respectively. 

Lombard had then been fined by the Criminal Court of Lille for hindering an investigation into the conditions of these deaths. The CHSCT had complained that it had not been able to investigate the circumstances of these two workplace accidents and that it had not been notified of the two accidents.

Adecco Group’s management claimed that the responsibility did not rest with Adecco, rather it rested with the user company that the temporary workers worked for. They then appealed the case to the Court of Appeal in Douai.

“This is the first time that a criminal judgment imputes this responsibility for working conditions to an agency," Damien Legrand, lawyer CHSCT, said.

The Court of Appeal stated that the "working conditions of temporary workers also depend on the temporary work enterprise,”, meaning that Adecco had responsibility to the two temporary workers.

20minutes.fr added that Lombard’s case did not prevent him from being promoted at the Adecco Group as he was a regional director at the time of the two deaths and is now a national director.