PLDT sacks 575 employees

Last September 17, 2007, the leading Telecom provider in the country, namely PLDT have sacked 575 employees from the fleet services, traffic operation, and network sector of the company.

Changes in technology and consumer demand are the main reasons for the phone firm’s decision to downsize its employees. Also with the decrease in operator-assisted national and international long distance telephone calls, they thought that manpower reduction at these times becomes inevitable. The company also decided that instead of paying these number of workers, they would just replace these people with fully automated machines that could increase their productivity while decreasing their operational costs.

“From 216 million calls in 2000, the number of operator-assisted international and domestic long distance calls fell to 153.8 million in 2001 and has continued to slide until it was down to 36.5 million in 2006. Customers have shifted massively to direct distance dialing and mobile phones because of convenience and lower cost,” PLDT spokesperson Ramon R. Isberto said.

The company has planned this massive lay-offs a few years before so to make this employee dismissal a benefit for both parties, they enrolled their employees to certain training courses for the past 3-4 to get them ready for the company downsizing and to prepare them for redeployment.

In a further note, PLDT offered generous compensation package plus a two-year medical program for the retrenched workers. According to the PLDT Press Release, "The package is the normal retirement benefit plus 100 percent premium while those with less than 15 years of service will receive 200 percent times the number of years or on the average, each employee will get P1.1 million compensation." All in all, it was almost a win-win situation between both parties.


References:
http://www.pldt.com.ph/media/news_img/PLDT_575.pdf

http://www.pldt.com.ph/media/monthNewsArchive.asp?monthToShow=9&yearToShow=2007