The website, The Layoff, is seeing a lot of comments from T-Mobile workers who say they’ve been laid off this week.
Fierce reached out to T-Mobile, and the carrier provided the following comment:
“These are continued organizational shifts that have been happening across our business. As we continue to hire top talent across the country (with over 3,000 posted positions), we are also making ongoing course-of-business organizational shifts in some areas of the company. These shifts are the outcome of opportunities we have identified to evolve our structure so we can best focus our resources in the places where customers need and want us to be. Our priority is to ensure impacted employees are supported during this transition. Many of them will be offered different positions.
It appears many of the cuts were in the networking business, based on The Layoff’s comments.
Generally, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires companies with 100 or more employees to notify affected workers 60 days prior to closures and layoffs. T-Mobile is headquartered in Seattle, but a check of this year’s Washington state WARN database doesn’t have any information about T-Mobile layoffs.
That may be an indication that less than 500 people were laid off. An employer must give notice if there is to be a mass layoff which does not result from a plant closing, but which will result in an employment loss at the employment site during any 30-day period for 500 or more employees, according to the WARN rules.
Sometimes companies get around WARN requirements by staggering their layoffs.
T-Mobile acknowledged a previous round of layoffs in July.
As would be expected, many of the comments on The Layoff are bitter. One anonymous commenter yesterday said, “T_mobile laid off hundreds of American workers yesterday and today while majority (> 60%) of engineering jobs are outsourced to India for the cheap labor which is directly hurting US workers. Employees who were working 18-20 years with legacy sprint and Tmobile lost their jobs without any notice in this blitz.”