The major Western operators in the telecom sector maintain a steady trend to reduce their workforce which has not stopped in the past seven years. Thus, the 22 largest companies in the sector are in Europe and Americaica They cut their workforce by 384,000 jobs Between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, which is a decrease of 21%, that is, one in five employees has been laid off in seven years.
The number of employees indicates that in 2015, the number of the entire 20 telecom companies He gave work to 1.84 million peoplea number that has fallen seven years later to 1.46 million, according to communications publication Lightreading.
Causes of wounds
Staff development has been characterized, in part, by problems with growth and margins for operators, particularly in Europe due to Excessive competitionwhich has led operators to reduce their workforce (as has happened in Spain with ERE in recent years by Telefónica, Orange and Vodafone) to Protect your margins. In the same line of cost savings, the Accords Infrastructure sharing (especially mobile phone networks), which led to cutting staff and outsourcing services, especially network maintenance, and transferring employees to companies that were responsible for the work. Other motivating factors were technological changes, since the adoption of the new 5G mobile networksthan automation, requires fewer personnel.
The same thing happens in Strip Fixed networks with fiber networks compared to copper cablesSince the former is more powerful and requires fewer resources to operate, maintain, or repair. Likewise, from the point of view of IT operations, moving many activities to the public or private cloud has also allowed the reduction of jobs in the technical staff molds.
Finally, the operators’ debt problems, especially in Europe, have led to debts being dealt with abstraction Sell subsidiaries entirely or divest themselves of the network’s assets.
Thus, in Europe, telecom companies initially sold their mobile communication towers, but also Fiber to the home (FTTH) networks or even data centers. And in all these operations there was also, along with the transfer of business, a part of the personnel involved.
most, in the United States
Among the companies that have cut their workforce the most, if the data from 2018 is taken, US companies stand out in particular. AT&T And Verizon. AT&T cut its workforce by at least 40% between 2018 and 2022, cutting it by 106,000 employees, to 163,000, though much of that reduction is due to its decision to part. Warner Media, its TV business, which explains the drop from 202,000 in 2021 to 163,000 in 2022. Verizon also implemented a significant cut, cutting its workforce by 27,000 employees, down 19% overall, leaving it at 117,000 employees. . However, in percentage terms, the second largest decline occurred in the Netherlands KPNwhich is one of the smallest of the large European companies, which although it has cut only 3,000 jobs, it accounts for 24% fewer employees, making it 9,500. Canadian European Central Bank (former Bell Canada) reduced it by 15% (8,000 employees), to 44,600. The fifth lowest is Spain’s Telefónica, which went from 120,138 employees in 2018 to 103,638 employees in 2022, equaling 16,000 employees. 500 employees, which is about 14%. orange (-9.3%, up to 136,430 employees) and BT (-8.5%, up to 97,148 workers, a very large workforce because BT Existing only in the UK) also applied significant discounts, unlike Vodafonewhich remained practically unchanged, with a slight decrease of 0.9% to 98,103 workers.
“Creator. Devoted pop culture specialist. Certified web fanatic. Unapologetic coffee lover.”