It was May 14 of this year and the Government authorized the purchase of Vodafone by the Zegona fund. The operation, valued at 5,000 million euros, not only involved the acquisition of the third telecommunications operator in Spain by market share, but also raised reasonable doubts about the maintenance of employment in the company, fears exacerbated by the economic hardships that it had been experiencing. the house, once a brilliant promoter of a market controlled by Telefónica, and the signing of José Miguel García to manage the process, an old acquaintance in the sector who already undertook a similar restructuring for the British firm in Euskaltel. That is why it was striking that the Government, unlike the obligations to maintain employment that it established to approve the merger of MásMóvil and Orange, limited itself to accepting in the case of Zegona commitments to guarantee the continuity of the service, the execution of future investments for the development of 5G technology and the preservation of contracts with the Administration and strategic assets.
The worst omens became reality on June 12, when Zegona presented an Employment Regulation File (ERE) for 1,198 workers, more than a third of the workforce, in conditions that were, for the most part, never seen in the sector. The firm, at this point, proposes a compensation of 24 days per year with a limit of 14 monthly payments. Sources internal to the company explain, on condition of anonymity, that this is the first step in a negotiation that could reasonably exceed 30 days per year and a red line of 24 months. These are figures, in any case, far from those that have traditionally been paid in the sector to compensate for the always painful departures, personally but also reputationally. Those who are in a similar predicament scrutinize the process carefully. Avatel Telecom, for example, plans to leave almost 700 workers, with a payment of 30 days per year and a limit of 18 monthly payments.
No one in the sector doubts that, despite the employment commitments assumed in the integration of MásMóvil and Orange, the new company will be forced, sooner or later and when the signed clauses expire, to seek synergies on the labour side. The reality is that, in the telecommunications sector, there is an excess of personnel by the thousands. The last employment adjustment by Telefónica, completed at the start of the year, already involved the farewell of more than 3,400 employees, with a wave of voluntary adhesions to the ERE. The conditions in the District, as usual, were unparalleled. There is consensus, however, that there is still room for departures, even in the corporate sector. “Not only is there an excess of people, there are even excess buildings,” says a senior executive in the sector ironically when referring to the situation of traditional telecommunications companies. “There is a problem of adaptation, which has not been helped by the community environment. To begin with, a labour-intensive sector has become mechanised and digitalised over the years. And along the way, in Europe we have missed the boat due to excessive regulation and the fragmentation of operators hopelessly limited by competition regulations. Executives have been denouncing these restrictions for years in the face of the yoke of Google and company,” he concludes.
Where will all these outgoing jobs go? Certainly not to Meta or Microsoft and the training of their artificial intelligence models. The quality employment that the Minister for Digital Transformation, José Luis Escrivá, sees as a desirable future for Spain is not in this new contingent of layoffs in telecommunications operators. “Normally, the bulk of the departures affect staff assigned to the network environment,” explains an analyst with a long career in the sector. “These are surplus profiles due to the end of deployments or because the development of modern networks has reduced maintenance and allowed for remote management. These are people of an age and a track record in companies that are less adaptable to the digital environment. Probably, they do not even intend to be. The case of those who are integrated into customer service processes is a different matter, more relocatable in other companies, but without such an obvious contribution of added value.”
There is no shortage of those who even see in the Ministry a clear awareness – disguised in public positions – that the purification is necessary to preserve the health that may be left to some companies also strangled by the price wars and the battle of the low costchampioned by outsiders of dubious background like Digi. Vodafone executives recount behind the scenes how, when they expected that the authorization to Zegona for the purchase of the company would be a mere administrative formality, they found a Ministry that was “tough and belligerent, especially with regard to maintaining the investment.” This is not surprising if one remembers the battle waged by Escrivá in Brussels with Masorange to, among other things, make clear the national interest in issues such as the strategic nature of the networks. A dog-eat-dog negotiation that has not been an obstacle for, according to these sources, the ERE of almost 1,200 people announced by Vodafone not to have been too surprising in Moncloa.
The path ahead ensures more curves. If, as the market speculates, Vodafone and Masorange end up closing an agreement to create a netco and exploit network assets, an option that was already on the table in times before Zegona, when the British firm and Orange were exploring their merger, obtaining synergies will be a must, in a business where contractors take care of part of the work. There is still a long and tortuous road ahead to address the decapitalization and the essential rearmament of the workforce in a sector that logically aspires to be a leader in technology.
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#debugging #telecoms #quality #employment #Meta #Microsoft