Deutsche Telekom has no current plans to cut more jobs on top of 32,000 cuts it has already announced for Germany by 2008, a company spokesman said in response to a German newspaper article on Saturday.
Bild Zeitung, citing an internal company document, had reported that Europe's biggest telecoms group by sales was mulling cutting another 23,000 jobs by 2008. A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, which is battling fierce price competition and issued a profit warning in August, said:
"We don't have any figures of this amount. More importantly, there are no decisions like that and there won't be any decisions like that for the foreseeable future." He did not rule out further job cuts and referred to past remarks by Chief Executive Kai-Uwe Ricke that the situation would have to be reassessed in light of future developments in telecoms regulation and new technology.
But the spokesman said it was premature to make any decisions or talk about numbers. Trade union ver.di executive and Deutsche Telekom supervisory board member Lothar Schroeder said he was surprised by the report and had not heard any discussion of such numbers, but said ver.di had already feared more job cuts.
He said he would demand an explanation from Deutsche Telekom's management, and that there would be trouble for the company if any such plans were confirmed, since there were too few staff to work on its new packages of products as it was.
Later, ver.di issued a statement calling on politicians to get involved. "It is time that politicians intervened to bring Deutsche Telekom to its social senses," it said.
The German government, which recently put pressure on industrial conglomerate Siemens to take care of employees of its bankrupt former mobile phones unit, declined to comment ver.di's demand. Like other former telecoms state monopolies, Deutsche Telekom is struggling with fierce competition from smaller, nimbler rivals.
The Financial Times Deutschland said last month that Deutsche Telekom wanted to cut costs by more than 5 billion euros ($6.3 billion) by 2010 through a new efficiency programme to be announced in November.
Bild, Europe's best-selling daily, cited the company document as saying the job cuts could go even further, and that the company could only competitively employ 93.000 staff. Deutsche Telekom currently employs about 244,000 people.
Comments
Comments are closed.