Outrage Joe! Talk talk staff given a months notice

seamus wrote: »

Yes it is enough notice.

But for a town like Waterford to lose 600 jobs, it's a pretty big deal. After the loss of Waterford Crystal a couple of years back, it's another huge employer gone from the area.

To put it in context, about 1% of Waterford County's total workforce (~45,000 people) were employed by TalkTalk.

In scale/impact terms on the local area it would be like Intel shutting down their Leixlip plant with a month's notice and leaving 5,000 people unemployed.

Just to say intel is closing one part of the new plant at xmas with 800 people let go...

MitchKoobski wrote: »

We were told at 12 via email that there would be a meeting in three hours about an "update to business strategy". At 1pm we found out they were closing the call centre from the RTE website. Then the local radio.

We started getting texts and posts on Facebook asking us what was going on. Half the town knew our jobs were gone before we did. The only notice given about the meeting was to our work email addresses. If you weren't in work yesterday, you found out via the news or someone in working telling you. They moved the meeting forward because it got leaked and told us themselves at half 2, even though everyone already knew at that point.#

The government were told yesterday morning, none of our management or employees were told, everyone just got the email at the same time. 30 days, which started today, for over 500 people to find new jobs to provide for themselves and their families.

This coming saturday theres a huge part being held over in England to celebrate the success of the company and give back to the employees. All our travel costs are paid for as well as accomodation and the day itself would be for families. Food, drink, music, games. Three days before a party to give back to the employees, they make 575 of them redundant.

As far as the sending staff to train other employees, this was a regular practice and done all the time. It was not a "warning" that our jobs would be going. Over the last year our centre completed multiple projects for the company and fixed the problems they had with certain departments. They were even going to launch TalkTalk's new TV service in our centre in a few weeks. The lads all got training for it during the summer.

doesnt suprise me one bit, call centres are run and managed by buffoons. the amount of times we've launched a new product and customers have asked about it before we're even told about it is laughable. sure I find out more about our upcoming deals on here than I do at work.

personal question and feel free to tell me f off, but is the redundancy package decent at least?

krudler wrote: »

personal question and feel free to tell me f off, but is the redundancy package decent at least?

I've only been there roughly 19 months so there'll be no redundancy awarded to me as far as I'm aware. Fairly sure the timeframe is 2 years and over, still no word on how much or what its gonna be based on.

They were definitely planning this for a least 2 or 3 months, but had the gall to lie to our faces when we asked were we gonna be closed. If they told us back then during the summer we would have had a good amount of time. Instead they did it just as the new school year starts for families and everyone goes back to work or college.

Orando Broom wrote: »

Create jobs? Out of what? We have nothing to offer the world. We rely on the largesse of American multinationals for one thing and guess what not a single job was created in the USA in the month of August, not one.

People are talking here and elsewhere like there is a jobs factory spitting out jobs, there's not.

Knowledge economy don't make me ****ing laugh. Our 'knowledge economy' can be more accurately described as a lemming economy with one tom after another running into yellow pack courses in IT's to become IT techs or 'engineers'. If that sounds like snobbery I'm sorry but I right. You simply cannot expect to lead the field producing people who got in to collge on sub 300 points and no second level fine tuning in your education path. I would have waltzed into computers or engineering on my LC points and I passed pass maths and quit TD at junior cert level. Ireland needs to get a ****ing grip and realise that we are a tiny ill prepared market in a massive ocean of global unemployment. we no longer have a comparative advantage, we are not cheap labour, we are not a very well educated nation (one University in the top 200), we offer a global mobile world nothing.

So what your saying is....we all should have studied a bit harder for the leaving cert?!

Orando Broom wrote: »

Create jobs? Out of what? We have nothing to offer the world. We rely on the largesse of American multinationals for one thing and guess what not a single job was created in the USA in the month of August, not one.

People are talking here and elsewhere like there is a jobs factory spitting out jobs, there's not.

Knowledge economy don't make me ****ing laugh. Our 'knowledge economy' can be more accurately described as a lemming economy with one tom after another running into yellow pack courses in IT's to become IT techs or 'engineers'. If that sounds like snobbery I'm sorry but I right. You simply cannot expect to lead the field producing people who got in to collge on sub 300 points and no second level fine tuning in your education path. I would have waltzed into computers or engineering on my LC points and I passed pass maths and quit TD at junior cert level. Ireland needs to get a ****ing grip and realise that we are a tiny ill prepared market in a massive ocean of global unemployment. we no longer have a comparative advantage, we are not cheap labour, we are not a very well educated nation (one University in the top 200), we offer a global mobile world nothing.

You make some very good points, but oh boy you seem so defeatist... which is quite depressing.

I'd like it if you wrote as well as you do about positive things that can happen.

i'm seriously considering boycotting companies who outsource their call centres to india and the like.

a: we bought the service in ireland and would expect said service to benefit local business

b: i dont have a f'ucking clue what most of them are saying to me!

sky, mbna, 3 mobile - every shagging time it's like 'sorry, repeat that' over and over again. really gets on my goat!

mathie wrote: »

The problem is also that our minimum wage is too high.
We're not competitive enough.

Eh, weren't most people in TalkTalk pulling down something like €400 a week?

Also, would you enlighten us as to how we can be competitive with India, a country where salaries for similar positions are 1/10th of what they are here?

miju wrote: »

Dont know about boycotting but Im moving from Hibernian insurance for that very reason it's a pain the face.

But at the end of the day when you compare 575 Talk Talk employees wages (€17.25 mill) to 575 average Indian call centre employees (€1.38 mill) your talking about a MASSIVE annual saving of about €15.87 mill.

Talk Talk call centre in Ireland was NEVER going to compete with that in any shape or form no matter how much the staff busted their balls.

Scotland suffered the same problem as us, we can't really compete on wages for jobs like this and the massive savings involved justify the often crappier customer service thebigbiffo is on about. A few customers might leave but it's worth the saving for them.

At then end of the day Talk Talk don't care about customer service. They just need somebody to answer a phone, which can be done elsewhere for much cheaper. Ask anyone who worked from both them and AOL, when they owned it, and they'll tell you that at least AOL treated them well. They did care about good customer service so were willing to pay for the great service the Waterford call centre provided. Talk Talk are completely different. I feel so sorry for everyone out there. It put many people through college, it provided employment for me when i couldn't get an engineering job after university. I still no people who work there, including my cousin. I just infuriates me more how **** the country has become.

But it's jobs like those in Talk Talk that are always going to be lost in Ireland in the current economic climate. Somehow we need to get jobs in which employers are enthusiastic about basing them in Ireland. Those could be businesses set up by Irish people employing Irish people, or jobs involving specific skills or talents we can provide, or somehow make an industry out of some natural resource we have, focus on the tourist industry, etc. One thing I think really has to happen though is for our wages to decrease. Obviously the cost of living would need to decrease somewhat as well to compensate but Irish wages on average are just too high to make Ireland attractive to potential employers, especially if those jobs can be done just as well elsewhere. I recently moved jobs to one in the UK and I effectively stayed on the same pay even though I moved up a level jobs wise. The levels of pay are just not the same between our two countries. Questions have to be asked why that is so.

If nothing is done only more jobs will be lost.

Richard Hillman wrote: »

I lost my job a while ago due to the company moving to eastern Europe. I ain't complaining because I believe in survival of the fittest and capitalism. One thing that I do feel let down by is that our governments don't go to war with these companies. British and US governments of years gone by have battled to keep low skilled jobs in their country. Here we just get a pat on the shoulder and a hard luck.

When another large employer in Waterford were considering closing a plant and it became apparent that the one in Scotland was going to be the victim apparently the British government offered the company tax breaks as well as free rent on the factory premises for a certain amount of time, all to try and convince them to keep the plant open.

Could you see our government doing anything like that? Instead you have TD releasing statements saying things like "tis a dark day" and "I will consult with my government colleagues about what we can do to turn the South East around.

Basically they've done sweet F.A. when every job was lost. When Waterford Crystal went Martin Cullen was a minister from Waterford and the government refused to guarantee a loan of a few million that would have allowed the company to remain in operation, albeit for a short while. A few months later they pumped billions into the banks. That tells you everything really.

rounding tattenham Corner wrote: »

all the workers are been done a favor, working in a call center is fate worse than death

I agree that a call centre job is not ideal for most people, but a wage is a wage. Faced with a job that I don't like or unemployment with little chance of re-employment I know which one I'd take.