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Eircom to shed 2000 jobs

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Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 10,007 ✭✭✭✭thebman


    And wait for a few days and union will probably again plead with the state to bail them out!

    Can't seem I'm surprised or even that upset given Eircoms track record with its customers of poor service, lack of investment in network and ridiculous high prices for service provided compared to competitors.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,819 ✭✭✭dan_d


    Yeah, but when taken into account along with this...


    http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/reports-banks-and-eircom-to-shed-4000-jobs-464111.html

    We are so unbelievably screwed.Still.:(:mad:


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 293 ✭✭Penisland


    population wrote: »
    In the Independent today

    http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/nightmare-for-jobs-as-eircom-to-shed-2000-2245555.html

    As much as I don't like to see people lose their jobs, this has been on the cards for a while. It is a bloated mess of a company and I would say whatever happens the future doesn't look too bright for eircom

    Most of these are voluntary on huge packages that will just end up causing more problems!!


  • Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Politics Moderators Posts: 14,568 Mod ✭✭✭✭johnnyskeleton


    dan_d wrote: »
    Yeah, but when taken into account along with this...


    http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/reports-banks-and-eircom-to-shed-4000-jobs-464111.html

    We are so unbelievably screwed.Still.:(:mad:

    The banks should probably shed even more staff than that, since they are not actually doing any new business. In particular, they should make cuts at the top levels and appoint receiver type managers to clear out the loan books. The branches should be kept on on a skeletal staff.

    Then, when they are solvent again, they can start re-hiring with new staff with new ideas.

    Unfortunately for those staff at the lower end, they will bear the brunt of the job losses while those at the top will probably remain.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 9,364 ✭✭✭ei.sdraob


    The banks should probably shed even more staff than that, since they are not actually doing any new business. In particular, they should make cuts at the top levels and appoint receiver type managers to clear out the loan books. The branches should be kept on on a skeletal staff.

    Then, when they are solvent again, they can start re-hiring with new staff with new ideas.

    Unfortunately for those staff at the lower end, they will bear the brunt of the job losses while those at the top will probably remain.


    eircom was rotten to the core well before the recession hit, and deserves to sink as a failed company (feel sorry for the employees tho alot of them are unionised job for life types that helped towards eircoms downfall just as much as the incompetent management), new better company(ies) will spring up in its place

    the faster this shower go down the better

    tho knowing our government they will get a bailout now :rolleyes:


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,076 ✭✭✭ingen


    population wrote: »
    In the Independent today

    http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/nightmare-for-jobs-as-eircom-to-shed-2000-2245555.html

    As much as I don't like to see people lose their jobs, this has been on the cards for a while. It is a bloated mess of a company and I would say whatever happens the future doesn't look too bright for eircom

    thats on top of the existing plan of 1200 job cuts.

    thats massive debt. the government should not bail it out what so ever, they have wasted too much cash so far on bailouts.

    i cannot see how they are going to get the cash to roll out fiber in many major towns , like they are testing in sandyford and wexford early next year..


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,428 ✭✭✭Powerhouse


    This is a non-story when you read it, no attribution or anything. Just a silly season Sunday front-pager playing on what people want to read about.

    This company has been stripped of everything by successive speculators and can hardly cope financially with its V/L offering. It will have neither the cash nor staff to roll anything out anywhere in the near future.

    But those who whinge about Eircom's prices should acquaint themselves with the restrictions the company faces regarding price reducation - in order to foster competition! You couldn't make it up.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,914 ✭✭✭danbohan


    Powerhouse wrote: »
    This is a non-story when you read it, no attribution or anything. Just a silly season Sunday front-pager playing on what people want to read about.

    This company has been stripped of everything by successive speculators and can hardly cope financially with its V/L offering. It will have neither the cash nor staff to roll anything out anywhere in the near future.

    But those who whinge about Eircom's prices should acquaint themselves with the restrictions the company faces regarding price reducation - in order to foster competition! You couldn't make it up.

    yes they have been stripped , but it also has a staff still stuck with a public sector mindset , complete rebuilding is needed


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,428 ✭✭✭Powerhouse


    danbohan wrote: »

    but it also has a staff still stuck with a public sector mindset


    That's an opinion which can't either be stood up or contradicted. Therefore it is meaningless.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,860 ✭✭✭horse7


    there seems to be a total lack of understanding of the dedication the ordinary eircom worker has towards his/her customers. the ex. vodophone boss is the ceo,who will pocket over a million if the new owners dont keep him on.the ex australian owners have pilfered the company,and as usual the workers will pay with their jobs to balance the books.


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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,834 ✭✭✭Welease


    horse7 wrote: »
    there seems to be a total lack of understanding of the dedication the ordinary eircom worker has towards his/her customers.

    Sadly thats not my experience.. I had to re-order my landline twice and broadband 4 times, because desite numerous install dates being missed there was never a record of my order in the system.

    I had a fault a couple of weeks ago (as did the whole street).. phone and BB down for 5 days, and noone could tell us what the problem was or when it would be fixed. Not one call was returned despite multiple assurances.

    And everyone knows an Eircom worker who's van is parked up most of they day outside their house :)

    Like most other companies there are good and bad seeds within the company..


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 10,007 ✭✭✭✭thebman


    horse7 wrote: »
    there seems to be a total lack of understanding of the dedication the ordinary eircom worker has towards his/her customers. the ex. vodophone boss is the ceo,who will pocket over a million if the new owners dont keep him on.the ex australian owners have pilfered the company,and as usual the workers will pay with their jobs to balance the books.

    It seems the engineers that turn up never fail to impress but everything else is a disaster in the company.

    The refusal to invest in the network now leaves the company in a position where it cannot compete with its competitors.

    A place many of the workers will not have known since it was previously state owned. The union wasn't complaining when the company was making massive profits early on with their shares but now the company is down the tubes, the workers will make out they did nothing wrong and it was all the corporations fault.

    Given the union had shares in the company, the members have to take a certain percentage of the blame for the poor decision making over the years.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,444 ✭✭✭Kalimah


    From what I've heard from a relation who works for eircom,the unions sold out the ordinary worker years back. Seats on boards of directors, seats on board of ESOP etc etc. The company was asset stripped by sucessive owners. The unions made deals with various owners that the workers never heard about until the deals were finalised. My relation has not had any pay rise in 25 years except for the national wage agreements. Ok ESOP was some compensation for that but those payments don't count towards the pension. ESOP is more or less gone now-the pension fund is crocked. The company is a basket case. And for those who trot out the line of the guy in the van parked outside his house for most of the day-I know one of those too. He gets the same salary as my relation who goes to work day in day out.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2, Paid Member Posts: 24,639 ✭✭✭✭Cookie_Monster


    dan_d wrote: »
    Yeah, but when taken into account along with this...


    http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/reports-banks-and-eircom-to-shed-4000-jobs-464111.html

    We are so unbelievably screwed.Still.:(:mad:

    3000 in AIB is the figure being mentioned by AIB staff I know


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,121 ✭✭✭RichardAnd


    3000 in AIB is the figure being mentioned by AIB staff I know


    How many do AIB employ in total does anyone know?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2, Paid Member Posts: 24,639 ✭✭✭✭Cookie_Monster




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,121 ✭✭✭RichardAnd




  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2, Paid Member Posts: 24,639 ✭✭✭✭Cookie_Monster


    RichardAnd wrote: »
    Ahh. But are those 2000 jobs losses to come from Ireland alone?

    well they are offloading most of their activities outside of Ireland so they wouldn't be see as cuts as such, simply sales.

    As fas as I can remember when working there in 07 it was 11,500 in Ireland


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 802 ✭✭✭Scarab80


    AIB Bank ROI 7,284
    Capital Markets 2,424
    AIB Bank UK 2,507
    Central & Eastern Europe 9,596
    Group(1) 2,870
    Total 24,681

    (1)Includes 2,283 in relation to Operations and Technology who support the business divisions (and whose costs are allocated
    to the divisions) and other head office departments.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,892 ✭✭✭Head The Wall


    Kalimah wrote: »
    From what I've heard from a relation who works for eircom,the unions sold out the ordinary worker years back. Seats on boards of directors, seats on board of ESOP etc etc. The company was asset stripped by sucessive owners. The unions made deals with various owners that the workers never heard about until the deals were finalised. My relation has not had any pay rise in 25 years except for the national wage agreements. Ok ESOP was some compensation for that but those payments don't count towards the pension. ESOP is more or less gone now-the pension fund is crocked. The company is a basket case. And for those who trot out the line of the guy in the van parked outside his house for most of the day-I know one of those too. He gets the same salary as my relation who goes to work day in day out.
    The ESOT own around 35% of the company so to say that they knew nothing about what was going on apart from what they were going to receive in money terms sounds like their own loss in fairness. They should have made it their business to do things properly.

    Tough luck is what I would say


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,819 ✭✭✭dan_d


    While I agree a lot of trimming down needs to go on, I'm looking at it from the point of view of someone who's job hunting and out of work. (hence my depressing attitude)
    That's 4000 more people to compete against.
    How am I ever going to get anything?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,834 ✭✭✭Welease


    Interesting comments by Senator Shane Ross on Newstalk this morning..

    His belief was that Eircom was never ready to be moved into the private sector, it had too many staff and to many bad processes... Once the government protection was removed and some (albeit low level) competition arrived, it was doomed to failure. He also felt the heavy union influence and colossal pension defecit (2 billion Euro) makes it a pretty unattractive company to potential purchasers..


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,914 ✭✭✭danbohan


    Powerhouse wrote: »
    That's an opinion which can't either be stood up or contradicted. Therefore it is meaningless.

    certainly meaningless if you have a public sector mindset!


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 10,007 ✭✭✭✭thebman


    The ESOT own around 35% of the company so to say that they knew nothing about what was going on apart from what they were going to receive in money terms sounds like their own loss in fairness. They should have made it their business to do things properly.

    Tough luck is what I would say

    Especially considering the media, Ireland Offline, the government and about half their customers were screaming to them to invest in the network for years.

    Sorry the whole I'm deaf thing, doesn't really work there, about the only way they didn't try to communicate this problem to them was using smoke signals.

    Now they have a network falling apart and are losing more and more customers everyday because they are too expensive and provide a worse service than the competitors.

    Bad practices maybe as Shane Ross said but they were happy to milk the existing network for all it was worth and have been screaming to the government to bail them out for a while now after taking Irish consumers for a ride by charging one of the highest line rentals in the world.

    Sorry to the workers who will now be jobless but this is one of the most hated companies on the island and I think most people will be glad to see the back of them once they finally do go under completely which just looks like a matter of time.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,428 ✭✭✭Powerhouse


    danbohan wrote: »
    certainly meaningless if you have a public sector mindset!


    This sentence doesn't appear to make any sense - but to repeat what I wrote if it helps: a statement of opinion which is incapable of either being proven or challenged is meaningless irrespective of your mindset - unless of course you are irrational and of the mindset that swallows cliché hook line and sinker and cannot operate outside a world of cant/received wisdom. That poster might as well have said that CRH employees prefer Mars bars to Twixes for all it adds to the debate. :confused:


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 9,364 ✭✭✭ei.sdraob


    Powerhouse wrote: »
    This sentence doesn't appear to make any sense - but to repeat what I wrote if it helps: a statement of opinion which is incapable of either being proven or challenged is meaningless irrespective of your mindset - unless of course you are irrational and of the mindset that swallows cliché hook line and sinker and cannot operate outside a world of cant/received wisdom. That poster might as well have said that CRH employees prefer Mars bars to Twixes for all it adds to the debate. :confused:

    see post 23

    no one wants them due to excessive "entitlements" hanging about like a bad smell and a heavily unionised and entrenched workforce

    sounds familiar?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,078 ✭✭✭conorhal


    ei.sdraob wrote: »
    see post 23

    no one wants them due to excessive "entitlements" hanging about like a bad smell and a heavily unionised and entrenched workforce

    sounds familiar?

    Indeed, a friend of mine used to supply call centre and performance monitoring software to Eircom, the heavily unionized employess that were a hangover from it's public sector days were a special group and they had to be excluded from all measurement metrics, you were not allowed to generate data on how many calls they took, or even if they logged into the queues on not. The place was a basket case.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,444 ✭✭✭Kalimah


    Well I'll tell you one thing-staff were and are screaming about lack of investment in the infrastruture but were ignored. I can scream all I want in my own job together with all my collaegues and my union to no avail. Management will do exactly as they please. Anyone who thinks the humble worker has a voice is sadly deluded.
    And forget the highly unionised bit too. The unions sold out their members a long time ago. The unions will do no more to look after their members than the management will.

    PS. Just saw that last post. As far as I know the call centre staff have not been public service in many a long year. Nor even employed directly by eircom.I stand to be corrected though. As far as I know there are very few staff left at this stage who have public service status. My own conncection there is in his 50s and has 30 something years done.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 666 ✭✭✭deise blue


    The banks should probably shed even more staff than that, since they are not actually doing any new business. In particular, they should make cuts at the top levels and appoint receiver type managers to clear out the loan books. The branches should be kept on on a skeletal staff.

    Then, when they are solvent again, they can start re-hiring with new staff with new ideas.

    Unfortunately for those staff at the lower end, they will bear the brunt of the job losses while those at the top will probably remain.

    Not sure how Eircom will prioritise redundancies but the Banks will target the older percentile of the workforce where the greater savings can be made,

    The banks will be anxious to hold on to the lower paid workers purely on a cost basis but given the fact that both BOI and AIB are highly unionised to achieve this the Banks will have to offer incentivised voluntary redundancy/early retirement packages or otherwise the IBOA will insist on a last in first out basis which will definitely not suit the banks plans.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 624 ✭✭✭Aidan1


    tho alot of them are unionised job for life types that helped towards eircoms downfall just as much as the incompetent management

    Eircom's staff and the CWU were and are the main reason why the company has been and is in such trouble. The CWU parlayed it's political influence (via the Labour party in 96-97) into a very generous ESOP*, including a seat on the board. And then, repeatedly and successively sold out the company to the next batch of 'investors' who took as much equity as they could out of the company, burdened it with debt, and flogged it again. The ESOP and CWU made out like bandits out of this process, hawking national infrastructure for their own gain, including greater ownership of the company, more seats on the board and more control. On that basis, I find it very difficult to have any sympathy for the unions in Eircom. Similarly, any claim by any leadership figure within the Irish trade union community that unions should have a greater role in running companies, State owned or not, should be met with outright derision, solely on the experience of Eircom.

    And while all of this was going on, the company couldn't recruit even half enough new staff because the 'old stagers' were unmovable, and the unions stood in the way of anything that might move things on. Moreover, it certainly couldn't afford to invest in infrastructure. The 7-8 year battle over unbundling is a case in point. This union inspired train wreck bears a significant responsibility for the difficulties experienced by hundreds of thousands of people in getting access to broadband of even moderate quality. There are other factors too, but this is where it starts.

    The new owners of Eircom seem to be more serious though, and between the FTTH pilot and other noises, at least they're trying. But if longstanding CWU members were to lose their jobs, I'd find it hard to feel overly sorry for them.


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