Bored at work? Sue the boss! 工作无聊怪老板？_BBC

Bored at work? Sue the boss! 工作无聊怪老板？

随身英语 Bored at work? Sue the boss! 工作无聊怪老板？

Play audio file 抱怨工作无聊？怪老板？一名法国公司员工把自己的公司告上了法庭，原因是他觉得自己的日常工作太无聊。本期《随身英语》带你看个究竟。

课文内容词汇: work 工作

You might have heard of people who consider suing their former employer for having been bullied or made to work overtime without pay. But what about taking your employer to court for having given you work that is too boring?

That's exactly what Frederic Desnard, a 44-year-old Frenchman did. He claimed that his bosses at a prestigious perfume company stripped him of meaningful tasks in his managerial job and gave him duties which were so dull they affected his health.

Desnard told French news agency AFP: "I went into depression, I was ashamed to be paid to do nothing". He went on sick leave for seven months and was fired in 2017. The former employee wanted €360,000 in compensation.

Some people might argue that being bored should almost be part of the job description. Lars Fredrik Svendsen, author of 'A Philosophy of Boredom' and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, says, "Most of the words for work in various languages tend to tell that it's a really unpleasant phenomenon. The French word travail goes back to the trepalium, it was a word for a torture instrument."