Clare Curran
Telecom could be set to axe up to 1500 jobs, in what
would be the single largest job loss of any single company in
New Zealand.
Labour's communications and IT spokeswoman Clare Curran says
Telecom is set to announce up to 1500 job cuts.
Telecom has already cut 373 permanent jobs, and future cuts
are believed to be planned over two to three years.
In February, Telecom boss Simon Moutter said the telco would
cut jobs from its base of 7603 staff, and did not rule out
more than a thousand jobs going.
Ms Curran said she had been told by a source that Telecom
would make the cuts this month, and the board of the company
was due to meet next week.
"The ICT sector is strategically important to our economy and
it essential to a high-growth, high-wage nation.
"This is a loss of skills and knowledge that will bite for
years to come. These are not low wage, low skill jobs. These
are the sort of jobs that we want more of.''
Ms Curran said research from Parliamentary Library showed it
could amount to the country's largest loss of jobs from a
single company.
A spokeswoman for Telecom said job cuts had been signalled by
the company, but would not confirm the number of jobs to be
lost, or when an announcement would be made.
Telecom announced last week it would scale back operations in
Australia, with an announcement it would axe about 120 jobs
from the Australian arm of its information technology unit,
Gen-i, leaving 60 people focusing on servicing and attracting
large trans-Tasman corporate customers.
Last year the Commerce Commission announced its approval of
Vodafone's $840 million takeover of TelstraClear.
The merger left a combined staff of 3200.
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