For two decades, Laurence Van Wassenhove collected a full paycheck from French telecom company Orange without ever being handed a task to finish. To an outsider, that might sound like a dream. To her, it became the reason she eventually took her former employer to court.
Starting Out at France Télécom
Van Wassenhove joined France Télécom in 1993, brought on as a civil servant and trained to work as a human resources assistant. She had real plans for that career. Not long after she started, health problems got in the way, limiting movement on one side of her body.
Staying in her original HR track stopped being realistic, so the company shifted her into a secretarial role instead and adjusted her workspace to fit her medical needs.
For a stretch of years, that setup held up. She was still on staff, still doing a job, and her employer had shown some willingness to bend around her condition.
Around that same period, France Télécom was moving through a major rebrand. Many of its services began operating under the Orange name in the years after Van Wassenhove was hired, before the parent company itself was formally renamed Orange S.A.
Today Orange is one of Europe’s largest telecom operators, with mobile and internet customers across dozens of countries.
That scale is part of why her case drew attention once it became public: a company of that size, quietly not assigning work to an employee for twenty straight years, is not a small detail to explain away.
In 2002, Van Wassenhove asked to move to a different region of France. The company approved the transfer. But her new office did not carry over the adjustments her previous one had made. An occupational health review followed and concluded that the position was not suitable for her condition.
Instead of finding her another role that fit, Orange placed her on standby, then shifted her to sick leave, and eventually offered her early retirement on the basis of her disability. She turned that offer down and stayed on as an employee. From that point forward, by her account, she was never given real work again.
Twenty Years Without a Task
What came next was roughly twenty years of being paid to do nothing in particular. She started referring to herself as an outcast secretary, technically on Orange’s payroll but left out of anything resembling an actual job.
Speaking about the arrangement, she told the outlet Mediapart, “I was paid, yes, but I was treated like I didn’t exist.”
The financial side of her life did not match the image of a guaranteed, worry-free salary either. She has said the paychecks did not stop eviction notices from arriving or keep her from struggling to cover everyday costs.
She is also raising two children, which added its own demands to a period she describes as draining rather than restful. Asked about being paid to stay home, she said, “It’s very hard to bear.”
There is also a piece of this that has nothing to do with money. Losing the daily structure of a job, the small talk with coworkers, the sense of being useful to something bigger than yourself, is its own kind of strain, separate from whatever shows up in a bank account.
Workplace researchers have long pointed out that people draw a surprising amount of identity and routine from their jobs, which is part of why prolonged exclusion from meaningful work can wear someone down even when their pay never stops.
For Van Wassenhove, that gap between being financially secure and being genuinely included is exactly what her case is built around.
Pushing the Case Forward
In 2015, Van Wassenhove filed a formal complaint with the French government and a national body that reviews workplace fairness concerns. Orange responded by appointing a mediator to look into the situation, but she says the outcome barely changed anything.
Years later, she moved from complaint to lawsuit, arguing that the company left her without real duties for years and never found a lasting way to bring her back into the fold.
Her lawyer, David Nabet-Martin, argues that Orange failed to provide the kind of reasonable accommodation French labor law expects for employees with disabilities, and that leaving her without duties for so long was the real issue, not an act of kindness.
He has also connected the prolonged isolation to a lasting emotional toll, arguing that steady work gives people with disabilities something a paycheck alone cannot: a genuine place in society and real social connection.
That argument sits at the center of her case — that being paid and being included are not the same thing, and that a company can technically meet its financial obligations to an employee while still falling short in every other way.
That argument has real legal footing in France. Under French Law No. 2005-102, employers with 20 or more employees are required to make workplace adjustments so employees with disabilities can keep working, and a refusal to do so can lead to real legal consequences, not just a poor performance review.
The rule was built to keep people with disabilities working alongside everyone else, not sidelined into a separate, invisible track. Nabet-Martin’s case leans on that same principle: that Orange had options short of leaving her idle for two decades, and that choosing inactivity over adaptation was itself the mistake.
Orange’s Side of the Story
Orange has not stayed silent on the matter. In a statement to the French newspaper La Dépêche, the company said it had done everything it reasonably could to keep Van Wassenhove working under good conditions, and that it had factored in her “personal social situation” throughout.
Orange has also said a plan existed to return her to an adapted position, but that the plan never came together because she was frequently on sick leave during that window.
That leaves two competing versions of the same twenty years. One side describes a company genuinely trying to work around a difficult medical situation, doing what it could within the limits of her health.
The other describes an employee who was quietly sidelined and then left there, collecting a salary that came to feel less like support and more like a way to avoid dealing with her altogether.
A French court will ultimately be the one to weigh those two accounts against each other.