'We have actioned meaningful cost efficiency efforts… to align our support costs with current demand to drive improvements to our bottom line'
Telecommunications giant TELUS is cutting 6,000 jobs from its business.
The workforce reduction will affect 4,000 jobs in the main business. Among them, half will be laid off while half will be offered early retirement and voluntary departure packages, reports The Canadian Press.
"The industry keeps changing and from a competitive perspective, we always want to prepare ourselves for the future,” says Doug French, TELUS CFO, in the CP story. “We see more digitization, we see prices are coming down in our industry, which customers are looking for. And so preparing to ensure we continue to be very competitive in the market, we need to align our cost structure to what that looks like."
Another 2,000 jobs will be cut from TELUS International.
“To mitigate the near-term pressure, we have actioned meaningful cost efficiency efforts involving team member reductions to align our support costs with current demand to drive improvements to our bottom line,” said Vanessa Kanu, TELUS International CFO, in a statement.
Accenture, Google, Meta and Twitter are also tech companies that have announced mass layoffs in the past few months.
In May, TELUS announced that it is offering nearly 2,000 voluntary severance packages and early retirement incentive packages to employees. But United Steelworkers Local 1944 expressed “deep disappointment” about the move, saying it’s “implausible” the telecom suddenly doesn’t need the labour.
Back in February, TELUS was investigating a breach of employee data after concerning messages were posted online by someone on a criminal forum.
