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Bit by bit, Sprint lays off workers |
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| Wednesday, 11 February 2009 00:00 | |||
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A few people here. A few people there. Add in a few retirements and buy-outs, and by the end of March the total number of employee reductions at Sprint Nextel Corp. in Overland Park will total somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000. Since Sprint announced Jan. 26 it would cut 8,000 jobs nationwide, small groups of Sprint employees locally have begun receiving termination notices. How many to date cannot be determined, said company spokesperson Lisa Zimmerman-Mott. She said Sprint had about 56,000 employees nationwide to begin 2009, and of that number about 12,000 worked locally. Zimmerman-Mott said the reduction process, by design, will be a gradual, rolling process; that at the time of the Jan. 26 announcement there was not a list of employees identified or targeted for termination. “It will be ongoing on a team-by-team basis through the middle of March with the last day worked (for terminated employees) being March 31,” she said. “There is no single day where every person will be leaving. “This is the process that had been determined before the announcement had been made. When the announcement was made Jan. 26, one misperception was that all these people were going to be leaving, and that’s not the way it works.” Zimmerman-Mott said Sprint is like any large organization that has many departments. “Sprint has a human services group, a marketing group, and then there are smaller sub teams within each of those,” she said. “So on a group-by-group basis it’s a combination of completing the process of identifying where and how to work and making sure business objectives are managed through. “To some degree, not all the decisions have been made. When you have this kind of decision, you have to determine how you’re going to manage your business and make sure you’re able to achieve your business objectives. “There are decisions that have to be made to make sure that the costs are aligned with the business needs.” The cuts will affect top management positions on down and also will include employees accepting early buy-outs, Zimmerman-Mott said. “The reduction affects employees at all levels of the business, in other words from the top down and then tiers down throughout the organization,” she said. “About 850 of the 8,000 nationwide reductions are from employees who volunteered to accept separation packages.” City or location-specific figures related to those numbers are not broken out, she said. Neither are the savings to the company broken out by location. The cuts are expected to save Sprint $1.2 billion nationally in internal and external labor costs. Terminated employees are eligible to receive some short-term benefits, Zimmerman-Mott said. “Sprint works with several outplacement firms, and employees who are separated involuntarily through this process have the opportunity, when the time is right for them, Sprint pays for that whole service however they want to utilize it,” she said. “We try to help minimize the impact with what we call separation packages, or severance packages, through continuation of salary, benefits, including health care coverage, and also outplacement services to help employees with their future opportunities.” Sprint’s action is a result of the current economic downturn, she said. “This is not a decision that’s made lightly,” Zimmerman-Mott said. “These are the most difficult decisions any employer has to face in any economic times, and these are tough economic times. “And Sprint makes these decisions to make sure the business stays strong and healthy for the long run and it remains committed to the Kansas City community. This is Sprint’s hometown and there is a lot of history here and tradition, and that commitment continues to be the case as it continues to be the largest private employer in the area.”
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