– Sprint Fires 2500: 8% Of Its Entire Workforce:
Anyone who dares to question Obama’s grand renaissance is supposedly peddling fiction. Meanwhile, in today’s latest mass layoff event (which, oddly enough, has become a daily thing during the “recovery”) some 2,500 Sprint workers – 8% of the company’s 31,000 total employees – have already received, or are about to be “peddled” pink slips.
According to the Kansas City Star, “layoffs and cutbacks at Sprint Corp. have claimed at least 2,500 jobs and struck six customer care centers, company officials confirmed.
The job cuts are coming mostly in customer care but also include 574 other positions eliminated at the Overland Park headquarters campus. The total does not include any jobs that may have been eliminated at other Sprint employment centers.
Last week, Sprint notified Kansas officials that 829 Sprint employees were told their headquarters jobs were being eliminated. Boyd said these included 255 at the Overland Park headquarters campus call center. She said 360 employees at the center would remain on the job after the cutbacks.
This wave of layoffs is part of a months-long effort to slash $2.5 billion in spending across all parts of Sprint’s operations. It also marks the third round of cutbacks at Sprint in the last two years.
Sprint shed 1,700 jobs in the fall of 2014 and announced plans to cut 2,000 more. The 2,500 come on top of those totals, bringing the announced job cut total in that time to more than 6,000.
An email notified all employees last week of the six call center closings that will idle about 2,000 employees. Marci Carris, Sprint’s senior vice president of customer care, said in the email that all of the layoff notices had gone out and that all of those employees would qualify for the current severance benefits, which can amount to two weeks pay for each year employed plus $1,000.
Sprint is reducing severance benefits for employees notified after Jan. 30. The new benefits will provide one week of pay for each year worked.
What little good news there is for Sprint employees is that they will largely know their fate over the next week: Michelle Boyd, a Sprint spokeswoman, said the layoff notices would be “largely completed” by Jan. 30.
However it is Sprint’s customers who may be stuck with the worst news of all: with fewer call centers operating, Sprint is urging customers to handle routine inquiries – such as checking bill balances and making payments, checking on device upgrade status, and checking on phone lease status – online or through the Sprint Zone app.
Also, if for some reason ObamasRecovery.gov gives you a 404 error, just keep trying.
And now, unleash the Sprint activist investors and bring on the debt-funded buybacks.