Bell Canada offers compensation packages to 1,200 unionized employees, attributing the movement to “unprecedented challenges” in the telecommunications industry, a spokesman for CBC News confirmed on Tuesday.
The company is presenting what the spokesman called an “improved voluntary separation program” for eligible employees, which says that it will give them the option to retire or find work elsewhere. Bell Media is not included in the voluntary purchase program.
The spokesman added that the company is changing and that several organizational changes, including the transfer of customers to newer fiber networks, have led to reduced work loads “that require less positions.”
“A harmful trick,” says the president of the union
The union that represents Bell employees condemned the purchase program in a statement on Monday.
“The workforce reduction plans are a harmful trick to temporarily reduce costs, which makes the profits higher behind workers’ back. Bell cannot continue to reduce jobs every year and expect the ship to change “Said Lana Payne, National Unifor President.
“Canada faces a commercial war with the United States, and Bell has chosen to leave unemployed Canadian workers in part to satisfy their movement to the US market once again.”
Sunday magazine22:22How the Telecommunications Industry of Canada is being remodeled
The Canadian telecommunications industry is going through some great changes. Last week, Bell’s parent company announced that it is reducing nine percent of its workforce and selling dozens of regional radio stations. Meanwhile, the dramatic battle for the control of the largest wireless carrier in Canada, Rogers, has finally established, but not all those involved are satisfied. The Globe and Mail Telecom Reporter and author of Rogers v. Rogers, Alexandra Posadzki, joins Piya Chattopadhyay to describe the family dispute that has shaken the rogers empire for years and paints a broader image of how cutaneous is the telecommunications industry really.
The Canadian telecommunications industry has seen a slowdown in growth during the last year, and the main actors such as ECB and Rogers have thrown some of their assets in an effort to reduce costs.
Bell sold his property participation of 37.5 percent in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) to Rogers for $ 4.7 billion last September. He announced a few months later that he would buy from the American telecommunications company Ziply for $ 5 billion.
However, the company has also made multiple rounds of employment cuts in the last year and a half, including 1,300 cuts in June 2023, an announcement of February 2024 that fired 4,800 employees and would close several dozen radio stations, In addition to more technical staff in June in June the same year.
