Eircom to cut 2000 jobs

MagicMarker

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1031/breaking52.html

Eircom is to seek 2,000 redundancies, a company spokeswoman has confirmed.

The lay-offs are expected to be completed by the middle of 2014. The redundancies will be across the company and is not yet known whether they will all be voluntary.

The company said the job cuts would bring eircom, which currently has 5,700 employees, in line with the European average for employee numbers and operational costs.

Eircom said in a statement that it had informed union representatives and planned to start discussions with them on the programme shortly.

Eircom chief executive Herb Hribar said the company faced considerable challenges.

“They require a fundamental transformation in the way we are organised, the business activities we prioritise and the work practices we have adopted in order to substantially reduce our costs and become more efficient,” he said.

Meanwhile, general secretary of the Communications Workers’ Union Steve Fitzpatrick said the job losses would have to be negotiated by the company and its workers.

“I hope that we do not have to remind anyone that workers at eircom negotiated and agreed a very difficult rescue plan for the company which resulted in significant cost savings, and sacrifices by workers and their families, to support the company,” he said.

“We welcome the management's commitment to engaging with the eircom workforce and their union representatives and we wish to stress that any further reductions in job numbers must follow established protocol and be on a voluntary basis only.”

The cost-saving programme will include the consolidation of under-utilised office locations across Ireland, the company added.

The scale of lay-offs at the troubled telecoms provider, which owns the Meteor mobile network, is twice what was expected earlier this year.

During an examinership process in the Commercial Court, a rescue package was unveiled which at the time involved 1,000 job losses as part of a five-year restructuring plan.

Three businesses - eircom Ltd, Meteor Mobile Communications Limited and Irish Telecommunications Investments Limited - were affected by the examinership, which was reported to be the largest in Irish corporate history.

Under the business plan proposals before the court, eircom’s gross debts were to be reduced from about €4 billion to about €2.35 billion.

The company was valued at about €8.4 billion around the time of its high-profile flotation in 1999.

God I hate Eircom!!! Just nationalize the damn thing and give Ireland a modern, competitive telecoms infrastructure. One where you don't have to pay €25 just for the privilege of having a line that on average can only get 1mb, if it can get anything at all.

admiralofthefleet

MagicMarker wrote: »

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1031/breaking52.html



God I hate Eircom!!! Just nationalize the damn thing and give Ireland a modern, competitive telecoms infrastructure. One where you don't have to pay €25 just for the privilege of having a line that on average can only get 1mb, if it can get anything at all.

it was doing grand when it was nationalised, it should never have been floated. i lost a fortune

Ghandee

Am I right in thinking that every landline in the country is owned by this crowd, and as a result any competitor had to rent the line from then?

Where To

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

MagicMarker

Where To wrote: »

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

Keeping you on hold.

wandatowell

Nearly 6,000 employees?????


Jesus thats nuts!

admiralofthefleet

Where To wrote: »

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

getting rid of little monsters

squod

MagicMarker wrote: »

God I hate Eircom!!! Just nationalize the damn thing and give Ireland a modern, competitive telecoms infrastructure. One where you don't have to pay €25 just for the privilege of having a line that on average can only get 1mb, if it can get anything at all.

By ''nationalize'' you mean liquidate, right? Jobs in eircom have always been nothing more than a retirement plan for the bewildered.

Kensington

Where To wrote: »

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

Coming up with ever more ****e emobile ads :mad:

kippy

Split the company in two, networks/infrastructure and consumer/business services, nationalise the networks portion. What should have been done before it went private.
2000 jobs is a lot but the company is on its knees after a decade of asset stripping.

kippy

Split the company in two, networks/infrastructure and consumer/business services, nationalise the networks portion. What should have been done before it went private.
2000 jobs is a lot but the company is on its knees after a decade of asset stripping.

kirving

Ghandee wrote: »

Am I right in thinking that every landline in the country is owned by this crowd, and as a result any competitor had to rent the line from then?

At a price set by the regulator afaik.
Who installed, and currently maintains the lines?

kirving

Ghandee wrote: »

Am I right in thinking that every landline in the country is owned by this crowd, and as a result any competitor had to rent the line from then?

At a price set by the regulator afaik.
Who installed, and currently maintains the lines?

Side Show Bob

Where To wrote: »

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

All 5700 employees making Eircom uncompetitive and strangling it of cash to invest and improve the network!

Fratton Fred

Where To wrote: »

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

well, 700 are actually installing and maintaining the network. Then there are the 3000 that look after those 700.

Of the remaining 2000, 1500 are usually found drinking tea, the other 500 work for Meteor.

Absolute mess of a company. the tragedy is, they have dragged Meteor down who prior to moving in to Huston Square were the model of a well run commercial organisation.

tuxy

admiralofthefleet wrote: »

it was doing grand when it was nationalised, it should never have been floated. i lost a fortune

The people who lost out were the ones who were gullible enough to believe anything Fianna Fáil said.
I remember feeling bad for some of the elderly people that lost a lot of money at the time

The_Kew_Tour

Seems to me people need get some facts right before they say anything.:)

The company is a joke, their main BB selling point now is access to some ****ty music hub. Leave that up to spotify etc. What people want is a nationwide fiber network.

Extremely professional ads on tv but never invested in their infrastructure, UPC are destroying them. All these employees must be the most underutilized in Ireland.

AlmightyCushion

Considering e-mobile have a

-Head of freedom
-Head of question things
-Head of doing things differently
-Head of non complication
-Director of wow
-Director of simplicity
-Director of thinking ahead

is anyone really surprised?

irishgirl19

Fratton Fred wrote: »

they have dragged Meteor down who prior to moving in to Huston Square were the model of a well run commercial organisation.

but Eircom own meteor so they can hardly be dragging them down now seeing how this has always been the case

kirving

cisk wrote: »

The company is a joke, their main BB selling point now is access to some ****ty music hub. Leave that up to spotify etc. What people want is a nationwide fiber network.

Extremely professional ads on tv but never invested in their infrastructure, UPC are destroying them. All these employees must be the most underutilized in Ireland.

eircom can't afford it. UPC had it easy as their wiring can handle far more information so it's pretty much just a case of upgrading equipment. It costs hundres of euro per meter to lay fiber optic.

irishgirl19

Kevin Irving wrote: »

eircom can't afford it. UPC had it easy as their wiring can handle far more information so it's pretty much just a case of upgrading equipment. It costs hundres of euro per meter to lay fiber optic.

guess who sold upc this wiring.
ironic isn't it.

petersburg2002

Just when you think Eircom customer support couldn't possibly get any worse.

krudler

Feel bad for people losing their jobs, but Eircom truly are one of the worst companies in Ireland, probably the worst.

starviewadams

Most of Eircom customer support staff are employed by Capita and not Eircom itself.

Kevin Irving

Kevin Irving wrote: »

eircom can't afford it. UPC had it easy as their wiring can handle far more information so it's pretty much just a case of upgrading equipment. It costs hundres of euro per meter to lay fiber optic.

Come on, this should of been done over the last 10 years when they monopolized the market. No excuse. ESB even layed a fiber network.

Yes, they cant afford it now but they just sit around doing feck all.

UPC didnt have it easy, they came in and done extensive upgrading throughout Ireland, where do you thing this high capacity network came from? Certainly not the old ntl infrastructure.

mike65

When sold off Errorcom had over 10,000 employees/shiftless arses.

saiint

thats great news
so were going to get even slower internet
i dont know if thats even possible

Logical_Bear

saiint wrote: »

thats great news
so were going to get even slower internet
i dont know if thats even possible

go with UPC ?

Celly Smunt

It's their own fault,they can't keep up with the infrastructure of UPC and bring in internal policies that replicate law (anti-piracy restrictions) to strangle their hopes of gaining new customers.

Capt'n Midnight

Kevin Irving wrote: »

eircom can't afford it. UPC had it easy as their wiring can handle far more information so it's pretty much just a case of upgrading equipment. It costs hundres of euro per meter to lay fiber optic.

Pantom circuits have been in use since the 1920's.

That's where if you want to wire up a third customer you rob a wire from each of two existing customers. You put transformers on it to kinda screen the lines from each other.

The third line will never have functional broadband.


Eircom delayed the rollout of DSL for ~two years while they were 'testing' it around RTE.

When Eircom first offered DSL to the public it was priced at EXACTLY the same as downloading the capped amount of data using pay per minute 64K ISDN line off-peak. :mad::mad::mad::mad:


NTL had to delay cable broadband rollout for years because they were forced to rollout digital TV. Virtually bankrupted them. because they don't make much money on digital TV since they have to pay for the channels.

A lot of people still won't forgive eircom and the regulators for years of having to pay per minute for barely usable internet access even though cable broadband was available (virtually uncapped in those days) for not much more than the price of Eircom line rental.


Blame the governemnt/regulators
Yes they should have nationalised the infrastructure, like Eirgrid. They should have insisted on cabinets and ducting on all new houses build during the boom. They should have insisted on function broadband for all state sponsored lines (iirc it's about 1 in 3 or 4 residential lines) They should have looked into providing OAP's with basic mobile phone contract as an option to land line.


Fibre to the home is expensive. Perhaps €2Bn to wire up the whole country ? at this stage it might actually be cheaper to roll out a new network in parallel than fix eircom


other eircom gripes
most if not all the guys who do the installs/repairs are subcontractors
it's amazing how much you can asset strip when you have a monopoly and can charge what you like for line rental :mad:

Grayson

irishgirl19 wrote: »

but Eircom own meteor so they can hardly be dragging them down now seeing how this has always been the case

It wasn't always the case that eircom owned meteor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(mobile_network)#Acquisition_by_eircom

btw, the original meteor logo on that wiki page is one of the ugliest I've ever seen.

Fratton Fred

irishgirl19 wrote: »

but Eircom own meteor so they can hardly be dragging them down now seeing how this has always been the case

Eircom bought Meteor in 2005, but didn't start trying to impose themselves until about 2007.

Then, for some completely absurd reason, eircom launched their own mobile brand in direct comparison with meteor which added even more competition into a small market.

Gummy Panda

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Eircom bought Meteor in 2005, but didn't start trying to impose themselves until about 2007.

Then, for some completely absurd reason, eircom launched their own mobile brand in direct comparison with meteor which added even more competition into a small market.

They had a brand issue with Meteor when they were going after specific segments of the mobile phone market e.g. SME

DrumSteve

hmmm, pity that. there are a lot of good people who work there that are hampered by the internal red tape and practices.

All of the CS is outsourced to Hcl/firstsource btw so I reckon these redundencies will come from direct eircom staff.

paddydriver

Where To wrote: »

5700 employees at the minute?:eek:

Doing what?

Deciding what option to assign to option 99 on the voice prompt system.

Stinicker

This will cost Eircom an absolute fortune, most Eircom's front line engineering staff are well into their late forties and fifties, all of these are there from the days of Telecom Eireann and the P&T. The company can do all they want but they cannot make one single one of them redundant, they have Civil Servant status and cannot be made redundant and this was one of the things that was agreed when Eircom was privatised, the staff became untouchable and also got an ESOP where the staff actually owned a sizable share of the company.

Each Eircom Employee and retired Employee since 1999 has gained over €100k from these shares (Tax-Free). Over the years their numbers have been dwindling as they have gotten massive lump sums to retire and large private pensions also.

Most of these "Telecom P&T" Eircom employees get around €80 - €100k lump sum upon retirement and pensions of around €300 - €500 week (depending on length of service).

It could be a case probably of all non Civil servants being made redundant and last in first out. Eircom will eventually face a future of having a minimal work force and will contract everything out, and their ex employees will most likely end up being the ones forming new companies and contracting for the work as no new Telecoms engineers or staff have been hired in the last 15 years bar 50 new workers this year. Their network and infrastructure is such a total mess that if they suddenly lost all their old staff the whole thing would collapse as the new lads wouldn't even know where to start unpicking it.

Eircom maybe a shambles but the blame for this lays on Fianna Fail who privatised it and ruined Ireland's telecommunications industry. The Communications Workers Union (CWU) seized the opportunity and saw to it that the employees benefited nicely from a bad situation. They are one of the best run Unions in Ireland and did not leave their members down like many other Trade Unions.

Death and Taxes

Ghandee wrote: »

Am I right in thinking that every landline in the country is owned by this crowd, and as a result any competitor had to rent the line from then?

No , you are quite wrong in that, but the vast majority of the landline infrastructure is owned by them.

oppenheimer1

kippy wrote: »

Split the company in two, networks/infrastructure and consumer/business services, nationalise the networks portion. What should have been done before it went private.
2000 jobs is a lot but the company is on its knees after a decade of asset stripping.

2000 jobs to go, but you have to remember that the Employee Share Ownership Trust were complicit in its downfall.

The seeds you sow, you must reap.