T-Mobile has reportedly told hundreds of Sprint employees they’re being laid off

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One day after T-Mobile suffered a 12-hour nationwide outage, some more bad news regarding the carrier has come out.

T-Mobile has reportedly laid off hundreds of Sprint employees this week. TechCrunch got hold of audio from a conference call hosted by T-Mobile vice president James Kirby in which he told hundreds of Sprint workers that they were being laid off.

While it’s unclear exactly how many Sprint employees are being let go, it’s said that there were hundreds of people on the call, which lasted approximately 6 minutes. One person on the call says that employees from every division were being let go and that Sprint’s BISO sales unit that focuses on small businesses is being cut.

The employees that are being let go will have their jobs until August 13 and are getting severance packages that are reportedly worth around two weeks’ pay for each year on the job. These Sprint workers are being laid off to make room for 200 new positions inside the merged T-Mobile, and Kirby is said to have encouraged the employees being let go to apply for those new jobs.

It’s always disappointing to hear about layoffs, but there will likely be people especially frustrated by today’s news because of T-Mobile’s insistence that its merger with Sprint would create jobs. That was an argument that T-Mo regularly brought up when fighting for the merger, with John Legere claiming that the new T-Mobile would “be jobs-positive from day one and every day thereafter” and that it would have more than 11,000 additional employees on its payroll by 2024 than what T-Mo and Sprint would have separately.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) opposed the T-Mobile and Sprint merger because it argued that the deal was likely to eliminate 30,000 jobs. Legere responded to that argument by saying those numbers came from “an analyst’s projections that were based on a completely different deal at a completely different point in time.”

T-Mobile hasn’t responded to today’s news of Sprint layoffs, but I’ll update this post if they do.

 

UPDATE: T-Mobile has issued a statement in response to today’s news about Sprint layoffs. In it, the carrier says that it’s begun a hiring initiative to add 5,000 new jobs over the next year. These jobs will include departments like Retail, Care, T-Mobile for Business, Engineering, and network organizations.

T-Mo also says that it’s examining its newly-merged company to “ensure that we focus our resources in the places where our customers need us most” and that as part of that process, some employees who have similar jobs are being asked to think about a career change inside T-Mobile while others will be supported in finding a new job elsewhere.

 

Sources: TechCrunch, T-Mobile

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