It’s been more than two years since T-Mobile closed its merger with Sprint, and the effects of the tie-up are still emerging.
Reports surfaced late last week about another round of layoffs from the company whose leaders claimed job creation as part of their sales pitch for the Sprint deal. It was bold at the time, as mergers pretty much by definition end in job slashing, aka “synergies,” as redundancies are eliminated.
T-Mobile acknowledged cuts were made but did not say how many people are affected in this latest round.
“As we continue to hire top talent, with over 2,000 positions open, we are also making normal course-of-business organizational shifts in some areas of the company that will allow us to better focus our resources on being in the places where customers want and need us to be. These shifts primarily affect a small number of ‘back of house’ management and administrative roles,” T-Mobile said in a statement provided to Fierce. “Most impacted employees have been offered different roles. A small number of roles have been eliminated.”
The spokesperson also said that based on what is known today, “our current employee count is greater than the sum of what T-Mobile and Sprint standalone would have looked like at this point had the two companies not merged.”
Jeff Moore, principal at Wave7 Research, said he’s aware there was another round of layoffs at T-Mobile, as seen on online forums like Reddit and Thelayoff.com, but it’s difficult to put an exact number to it. Market development managers and retail associate managers are among the positions that have been impacted, he said.
Roger Entner, who tweeted that something was afoot on Friday, said he does not know exactly how many people are affected but that it’s probably in the hundreds and appears to involve quite a few departments.
He also noted that the engineering side of the house has been decommissioning the Sprint network, so “they might be able to say, especially in engineering, ‘thank you very much for shutting down the network. We’re shutting you down now too.’”
At the end of 2019, T-Mobile employed about 53,000 full-time and part-time employees, including network, retail, administrative and customer support functions, according to its 2020 10-K filed with the SEC. At the end of March 2019, Sprint had about 28,500 employees.
Taken together, that’s about 6,500 more jobs than what T-Mobile reported for a total headcount at the end of 2021, which was 75,000 full-time and part-time employees.
Critics of the merger predicted massive job losses. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union estimates the number of job cuts at T-Mobile since the merger is 19,840.