T-Mobile is sparking controversy again with another round of post-Sprint merger layoffs
This may seem like a century ago, but it was only a little over a couple of years back that T-Mobile finally managed to complete its multi-billion-dollar Sprint takeover after an apparently never-ending regulatory approval process.
A number of things were crucial to the completion of said process, including the involvement of a third party that was supposed to keep the US wireless industry's competition intact, T-Mo's guarantees that the merger would lead to otherwise impossible 5G advancements, and last but not least, a questionable vow to add jobs to the consolidated new carrier rather than handing out an avalanche of pink slips.
Unfortunately, as experts warned... all along, it doesn't look like Magenta is making good on that latter promise, in fact laying off thousands and thousands of employees in a quest to eliminate "redundancies", as is pretty much always the case with mergers of this magnitude.
While the extent of the latest round of layoffs is essentially impossible to correctly assess in the lack of clear and detailed confirmation from the second-largest US mobile network operator, several analysts and market observers are estimating "hundreds" of people across "quite a few departments" are finding themselves in a position to seek employment elsewhere in a pretty challenging economic climate.
This is far from the first such news reported in the wake of the April 2020-completed merger, with a large number of Sprint employees fired a little later that same year and official 2021 SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) figures suggesting around 5,000 jobs had already evaporated as a (direct or indirect) consequence of the union between the nation's third and fourth-largest wireless service provider as of three years ago.
For its part, T-Mobile continues to insist its "current employee count is greater than the sum of what T-Mobile and Sprint standalone would have looked like at this point had the two companies not merged." That sure sounds a little different to what the company promised before the merger was cleared, not to mention that it relies on a hypothetical scenario no one can really gauge instead of the simple pre-April 2020 reality.
What's crystal clear and definitely not hypothetical is the dissatisfaction of all the newly terminated T-Mo employees, many of whom reportedly felt relatively secure about their future with the company, and the somewhat widespread customer concern that these layoffs will further impact the "Un-carrier's" declining support service.
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