The T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Hasn't Created Jobs -- It's Cut Thousands (theverge.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Wall Street Journal reports T-Mobile's engineering and network operations teams are experiencing waves of layoffs, which have included managers and executives, on top of thousands of jobs eliminated by restructuring after the company merged with Sprint in 2020. T-Mobile execs promised then that the merger was "all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the new T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter."
In April 2020, the companies had about 80,000 workers combined; however, as the Journal points out, T-Mobile's most recent annual report (PDF) said it ended 2021 with 75,000 full- and part-time employees. A company spokesperson told the Journal that the layoffs "were part of continuing organizational shifts during the past few months" without exactly saying how many jobs were eliminated or if there would be more layoffs in the future. T-Mobile said the post-merger company would employ at least 11,000 additional workers by 2024, but so far, it looks like the exact opposite is occurring.
In April 2020, the companies had about 80,000 workers combined; however, as the Journal points out, T-Mobile's most recent annual report (PDF) said it ended 2021 with 75,000 full- and part-time employees. A company spokesperson told the Journal that the layoffs "were part of continuing organizational shifts during the past few months" without exactly saying how many jobs were eliminated or if there would be more layoffs in the future. T-Mobile said the post-merger company would employ at least 11,000 additional workers by 2024, but so far, it looks like the exact opposite is occurring.
Yes, they are eliminating redundent management (Score:5, Funny)
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Must have been either dedicated or incompetent. It seems as though the smart use of a golden parachute is to ride it to another position that will offer you another one.
Golden parachutes - gotta collect them all.
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Except that at some point you are promoted to level of your incompetence. If you get a golden parachute at that level it might be difficult to get more so good ones.
Thus that CEO might have looked and come to the conclusion: "I have a good salary and I do not need to do much work as they have no real tasks for me and I am not likely to get as good paying hob so I might as do this one until they kick me out"
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Actually most of the losses in a merger are in Accounting and HR, followed by sales and marketing as they consolidate their channels. Development management usually lasts longer in the first year as existing projects usually still need to be finished.
Re:Yes, they are eliminating redundent management (Score:4, Funny)
Oh no! Not HR!!! Anybody but them!!!!!
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Nah.
Most of the time, the execs get a nice offer to go, please. Which they take because they knew about all of this long before the regular folks did, and they've already used their network to secure the next job.
Meanwhile, the normal folks are now redundant and get fired, plain and simple. Maybe not immediately, depending on promises made and contracts signed, but soon enough. They are now unemployed.
Then, a year or two later, the company grows again and hires more people. But it doesn't re-hire the same p
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If the only way to grow profits and revenue is by increasing payroll, they will do it reluctantly, kicking and screaming, bellyaching about workers actually asking for wages and benefits, having the gall to seek work-life balance, bemoan the loss of so many dollars given as salaries to low life flunkies that could have been given as bonus to pointy haired bosses ... And they will cut payroll at the first sign of dark clouds on the horizon.
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I imagine the board room looked something like this after it was rubber stamp approved. https://imgflip.com/i/6s0hd1 [imgflip.com]
Re:Yes, they are eliminating redundent management (Score:4)
Re:Yes, they are eliminating redundent management (Score:4, Informative)
They cut a bunch of managers on Monday but Tuesday and Wednesday they cut just as many Eng out of the advanced Engineering and Core packet (LTE/5G side) teams, ask me how I know.
On the bright side the severance package is pretty good and I'm already getting hits from recruiters and direct hires for more money.
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Was that on the Sprint side, the Tmo side, or both? It would make sense to me (as a mostly speculative observer from the sidelines) to let more Sprint people go, as they had taken what started as a relatively fantastic network (in the late '90s, compared to other networks of the late '90s), and made it a very solid 4th place out of the 4 major US carriers. If they let most of them go, and added a few of the best to the Tmo side (which has taken a network from being "really pretty crappy" in the mid 2000s,
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It was across the board both sides of the company core side got hit the hardest with all the redundancy and more magenta managers than yellow. It wasn't personal they decided to free up money at the C-Suite level.
Your assessment is pretty far off, you really don't know anything about the internals of Sprint or T-Mobile. I know both networks fairly well as a tier 4 eng Sprints enterprise network is at least 3 maybe 4 years ahead of anything magenta had/has at merger. Sprint also had all of the towers and
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I don't have a personal hatred for Sprint, but I experienced them as a customer from the late '90s until somewhere around 2010, and then became a Tmo subscriber. I also had the misfortune of experience a few Sprint datacenters around the 2007-2009 timeframe - they were abysmal. I readily acknowledge having little knowledge of the internals of either network (and said as much), but from a consumer standpoint of "do I have reasonably fast coverage where I need it," Sprint went from being a leader to being l
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Re:"Mergers" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why companies are even allowed to make obviously-fraudulent statements like "jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter." when talking about mergers. The ENTIRE reason FOR a merger is to eliminate jobs. It also eliminates a competitor of course, but if the market was so rich that zero of the competitor's positions were redundant with one's own positions, then the two companies would just be scooping up that business and not even talking about mergers yet.
There is a secondary reason for a merger, or course: to raise prices. Competition keeps prices down so eliminating that invariably drives prices up and quality of service down. Prior to a merger both sides swear up and down that this will allow them to raise quality and lower prices due to better focus, and such statements are obviously-fraudulent as well.
There are no exceptions. I think all regulators know that these statements are lies, and tolerate them, because they make the public more accepting of the phenomenon of monopolism in mature markets.
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I agree - I'm not surprised the least.
You might need a few more techs to maintain and manage the larger equipment base, but it's not uncommon to outsource the network maintenance to some external company and just not having to do the layoff themselves.
I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! (Score:5, Insightful)
They're businessmen. Therefore they lie. Nothing to see here, folks...move along.
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Modded "funny", but it could also be "insightful".
Say what ? (Score:2)
Since when can we believe one word that comes out of management when mergers are concerned ?
That was the plan (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at T-Mobile when they were doing the merge, and LOTS of people there knew that the workforce would be heavily trimmed. They had teams planning which "Yellow" (Sprint) employees would replace "Magenta" employees (T-Mobile).
T-Mobile was contractually obligated to retain X% of the Yellow team, but there was lots of overlap and all they had to do was find a way to justify the cuts.
People were switching departments as fast as they could because they some teams/departments would be subject to cuts and some would not. (I didn't care, I was a contractor.)
It was never about creating *more* jobs, it was ALWAYS about compacting and reducing head count while gobbling up Sprints client footprint, service base, and spectrum allocation.
This may come as a shock to some of you, but companies don't merge to "save jobs", they do with the goal of a reduced head count (after all the dust settles).
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Also, if you look at the Slashdot article about the merger being completed, it's from April 1st, 2020. Now what else was happening then?
Most of the merger was planned prior to COVID-19 and the pandemic tanking the global economy. Since then, we've had to deal with Bidenomics and the US economy spiraling into a recession that the Fed is warning is going to get worse.
Now it seems unlikely that the merger was ever really going to create an additional 10,000 jobs, but it does seem plausible that it may have cre
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Also, if you look at the Slashdot article about the merger being completed, it's from April 1st, 2020. Now what else was happening then?
Now it seems unlikely that the merger was ever really going to create an additional 10,000 jobs, but it does seem plausible that it may have created additional jobs as the merged company moved forward
I agree, no one should be held to task because their pre-pandemic plans didn't pan out. No kidding, virtually everything got thrown into chaos.
I didn't read the original pronouncements. If anyone thought there wouldn't be layoffs because of a merger, they were delusional. Of course there would be some. What I assume is, as you said, the merged company would grow faster than either company on their own and net-net, you'd have more people working than if the companies stayed separate. Never mind, of course, t
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Your lucky I posted to this thread already or it would be down-voted for stupid.
Sprint was not bankrupt we had three years of positive growth before the merger I know I was with the company up to this Tuesday.
The only reason the merger finally happened was both company's was healthy, it made a lot of sense. The merger was a 10+ year project from both Soft Bank and Deutsche Telekom with two rock star CEO's to get it done (both long gone).
T-Mobile is now the second largest carrier after Verizon with a huge l
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What you said is more or less what I understood. I don't recall Sprint being in any financial trouble.
T-Mobile had teams that were tasked with helping the Sprint people adapt and be absorbed into the Magenta collective gracefully. All in all I recall it went okay, at least in my dept.
There were emails telling T-Mobile employees to be welcoming to the Sprint folks, etc etc etc. And then (because of the merger of course) my contract went *poof*, and I was on to the next adventure, lol.
My manager was mad mad
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Well, they merge to increase profitability. Part of how they do that is by becoming "more efficient", which always results in reduced head count.
Race to the bottom (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Race to the bottom (Score:2)
Not quite Americans are greatly overcharged and paid for most of the infrastructure and research.
Take SMS Europe and Japan largely never paid per message it is an abstraction layer that cost nothing to operate.
The fact that they can lower things means they have been ripping you off the whole time.
Also when you investments are largely paid for buy taxes, the longer in use the more roi.
An AC tech has to deal with actual market pricing likely not tax payer backed.
So the example isn't relevant or similar.
Re: Race to the bottom (Score:4, Informative)
Every year I pay NANP (north american number plan) a fee. They are the the agency that assigns blocks of TNs to carriers. But I dont have blocks of numbers, I have to rent them from an aggregator as previously mentioned. Every year I pay the Telecom Relay Services a fee, also based on the 499A filing. Every quarter I pay into the Universal Services Fund. This used to not apply to small companies who were deemed 'deminimus'. This contribution factor was based on if your contributing amount was less than $10,000 you simply did not contribute. When the USF fee was 12% it wasnt difficult. Now that it has risen to over 34% in given quarters, it is much more difficult for any company, no matter how small, to avoid paying into the USF. STIR/SHAKEN spun up a couple more regulatory commissions. The idea was to prevent callerID number spoofing (specifically RNIS). A simple requirement that you could not pass on a callerID source number that was not assigned to you would have sufficed. But instead they created an overly complex token SSL certificate system, whereby only 6 companies can host and sign your tokens. Meanwhile the overseers charge you a contribution factor that has the company making $1 paying the same as a company making $50,000,000 dollars annually. On top of that, those 6 certificate authorities want another large amount, because they can, to host and sign your digital key, that you have to attach to every call. Did I mention that 3 of those 6 are only in it for customers of their provided hardware? Leaving you only 3 to try and price shop?
Those regulations were setup as a result of congress asking the foxes how to build a better hen house. All this takes time and money, not just to the regulatory agencies, but to file reports and paperwork. Time that is no longer spent doing billable work for a customer. So when the average cost per seat drops from $35/seat to $20/seat over the last 7 years, while the cost of energy increases, the cost of labor increases, the cost of health insurance keeps going up 15% a year, and every other payroll nightmare, it sucks. Even though the regulatory fees are often passed on to the consumer under the taxes and fees area of their bill, none of that has any profit margin for the company. Its estimated that in a couple more years, the amount of your taxes and fees section will equal the amount paid in services, due in part, by the lowered costs coupled with rising rate of regulatory fees and percentages. At no fucking point was I ever ripping off the customer.
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I live in Europe and in the beginning there was a fee for each SMS.
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who would have thought ? (Score:4, Informative)
What a surprise. Nobody could've expected that. All the mergers in the history of capitalism have always created endless jobs, except this one. Right?
Seriously, can we get a category for "expected result happened" ?
The real idiots (Score:4, Informative)
So like the 1500 mergers before? (Score:3)
Why is that a surprise?
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Always subject to change (Score:2)
It's easy to forecast job growth when the economy is improving. But, when inflation sets in and the Fed jacks up rates to cool the economy, of course things change.
T-Mobile was under no contractual obligation. It was a forecast based on best-available economic data at the time -- always subject to change.
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>It was a forecast based on best-available economic data at the time
That's baloney. Every merger, and every silken handshake between government and industry for tax incentives, comes with a glowing PR announcement that's all fluff and not binding in any way. And this is of course entirely legal. There is room to argue that maybe these mergers and tax incentive plans do benefit regular folks. But there is no room to argue that any one individual transaction is ever even meant to live up to its hype.
I don't know (Score:3)
T-Mobile to Governors in July: We Are SO Hiring! (Score:2)
T-Mobile CEO President and CEO Mike Sievert in July joined other tech CEOs who are now hitting the brakes on hiring to publicly call on "the Governors and Education Leaders of the United States of America [slashdot.org] "to update the K-12 curriculum, for every student in every school to have the opportunity to learn computer science" to fill "over 700,000 open computing jobs."
"The undersigned commit our support by collectively creating employment opportunities for computer science students in every city in the US
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Investing in K-12 education is not about today's job market. It's about the future job market. Employers need to react to fluctuations in the economy. The job cuts today are in response to a slowing economy today. These companies plan on growing over the long term. That long term growth requires people entering the future labor market with the skills projected to be needed in the future. Hence they want to ensure those entering the labor market in ten plus years are taught the right skills.
did nobody ask what kind of jobs would be created? (Score:3)
I'm guessing there will be many new jobs in demand... yacht crews, chauffeurs, mansion groundskeepers, house servants, personal assistants, nannies, private jet maintenance, exotic car brokers, tax haven consultants, gig workers, bankruptcy advisors, job recruiters, etc.
I mean, *somebody* made out on this deal, they're gonna need help spending it; the laid-offs should try to get on that gravy train instead
Can think of only one appropriate response... (Score:2)
Frog, meet scorpion. [wikipedia.org]
What Did You Really Expect? (Score:3)
Rubber Biscuits? with some apologies to The Blues brothers
Seriously, what did you expect from this merger...or any business merger for that matter?
Job losses is a major part of the consolidation of overlapping business processes.
Business reorganization is another situation where job losses can be expected.
This is the purpose of most mergers (Score:3)
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Mergers are done to eliminate competition. That's all. Companies aren't buying the talent, they don't want the talent. I had a guy tell me once "we didn't buy the company because we cared about you. Truth is, you were competition. We wanted to see you fail. We made sure you failed and now all we want are your customers. We don't care about your technology, we don't care about your company, and we sure as hell don't care about ANY of you. None of you are getting positions at our company. We do not care about
Having Been Through A Couple of Mergers.... (Score:2)
They lie. They flat out lie. They have zero intention of retaining anyone from the old company. We were all told the same thing by a large company when they bought our local provider. They had spots for "everyone". "No one will be losing a job".
We all lost our jobs. Everyone on the original side....laid off. We were considered redundant and "last hires"; so we were first fired.
Executives, managers, engineers, techs....everyone that was working for Sprint will not have a job in the new TMobile when it's all
Could have been worse (Score:2)
If you think about it, T-Mobile and Sprint were at the bottom of the pile. Had they stayed separate, at least one of them would have likely gone under, possibly both. Every merger will have its redundancies so unless one of two people doing the same job reinvents themselves internally, they will get canned. It's basic economics despite the people who think a company's mission is to keep people employed.
At least T-Mobile is smart in partnering with SpaceX/Starlink to offer satellite phone service rather t
Businesses don't exist to create cost centers. (Score:2)
Why is this news?
Surprised? NO! (Score:2)
I am showing my age here. In 1980, Burroughs bought System Development Corporation (SDC). The CEO and the President of Burroughs did a flashy video in which they praised SDC's reputation for integrity, which they said had actual monetary value. They promised they would not change SDC because such change might impair that value. That promise lasted only 6 months.
Around 1986, Burroughs merged with Sperry Univac to create Unisys. Combined, there were 120,000 employees. As of 2020, there were only 17,200
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34 years later the employee number is different !?! SHOCKING I TELL YOU!@
neoliberalism (Score:2)
Quality of jobs (Score:2)
I was one of those cut .. 20+ years at Yellow / Sprint in a high level role.
The context missing from the conversation is the quality of the jobs cut and created.
The ones most recently cut were engineering, network operations, planning and the people who support those tasks.
That is to say, paying market rate or better for long tenured career professionals with degrees, industry certifications, all that.
The jobs the merger _did_ create are seemingly customer care and retail jobs. Jobs that need doing, but n
As expected (Score:2)
You do not do a merger to hire more people. You do it do get rid of a large number of them and server more customers with less people. Rather obviously...
Well, they did buy *Sprint* after all. (Score:2)
Considering the quality of Sprint at all levels, from the service to their features to their equipment to their provisioning/activation to the value for your dollar to even their billing and customer service... T-Mobile picked up quite a lot of dead weight in that acquisition. I mean... I know we all love to hate on AT&T and Verizon. But if you've ever had the displeasure of being a Sprint customer; you know that it was them who really were just the worst. So it is not inconceivable that T-Mobile is
Why is this news? (Score:2)
A merger creates new jobs - now *that* would have been news.
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Because for _this_ merger, they surrounded the purchase with pretty language that this one would be different, that it would create jobs, that it would fill the digital divide, that it would reduce prices and keep competition the same.
None of that was true of course, but that's what they sold it as, hence the "ah-ha!" headlines when none orf those things came true.
That's good (Score:2)
If you can produce equal or more with fewer workers, that is good, because you have increased productivity and efficiency. Creating jobs for the sake of jobs is bad for the economy.
Couldn't see it coming. (Score:2)
It was funny to see all the Sprint workers reject the idea that there would be headcount cuts. I just kept wanting to ask them, "how many of your _current_ coworkers came from the Nextel merger?"
I'm shocked ... (Score:2)
that they can pretend to be shocked.
Mergers are NEVER about creating jobs! (Score:1)
It's ALWAYS about eliminating redundancies. How stupid or naive do you have to be in order to believe otherwise???
Sprint was terrible (Score:1)
Sprint was doing poorly when they were accuired, it seems unlikely they would have lasted much longer on their own.
Mergers Don't Create Jobs (Score:2)
companies merge to cut # jobs needed then (Score:2)
we wait for the trickle down to create more jobs? This seems like a bad rerun...
So, add another line to ... (Score:1)
1.) I love you
2.) The check's in the mail
3.) I won't c&* in your mouth
Maybe just add another line to it:
4.) I'm an executive and I care about workers