BT Staff reductions/holidays

BBC

Telecommunications giant BT is offering staff the chance of long holidays in return for a big pay cut.

The former state-owned company is looking to reduce its wage bill while trying to avoid redundancies after being hit by the economic downturn.

One option available to staff is an up front sum of 25% of annual salary in return for taking the whole year off.

Employees have also been offered a one-off payment of £1,000 if they agree to go part-time.

Parents will have the opportunity to restrict their hours to school term times to allow them to spend time with their children.

If service is often bad enough with all staff working their contracted hours, who knows how much it will deteriorate once this happens?

arent these losses all from BT global, so wont be repeated since BT is ending its business in that market? if thats the case its a knee jerk reaction.

I cannot see many people on say 17k a year taking this up, they will have about 4k to live on and wont be able to claim benefits since they employed. Would only be of any kind of attraction to people who salaries are high enough that 25% is still a liveable wage.

Also what happens to the work that would be done by the people taking a year off, are standards going to plummet?

15k job losses last year predicted same this year, the company is shrinking extremely fast, if they get by with someone taking a year off they likely to then cut the position permanently so its wise for any employee to reject the terms as its effectively waving bye bye to job.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sat 04-Jul-09 08:18:54)

>Also what happens to the work that would be done by the people taking a year off, are standards going to plummet?

This is what i'm thinking. Standards within BT already appear to be extremely low.

You are correct about few people taking this up so perhaps there will be more redundancies and yet further reduction in quality.

I'm sure BT would offshore everything including engineering if it were possible.

Its amazing how this companies reputation has declined so much in the last decade.

The board should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

standards are history at BT, this is now clear. Their #1 priority and beggining to look like their only priority is profit, forget quality of service and reputation.

If the losses were all BT global then they should have just sat tight and written it off, they will be back in profit this year.

I'm not sure it would be a bad thing if BT went bust to be honest.

In reply to a post by citizenx:

I'm not sure it would be a bad thing if BT went bust to be honest.

Then what? You could get Sky or worse still Talk Talk taking them over.

Adrian using Linux on his laptop and loves it.

BTBroadbandanywhere type package.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by citizenx:

I'm not sure it would be a bad thing if BT went bust to be honest.

Then what? You could get Sky or worse still Talk Talk taking them over.

Do you really think Sky or CPW could afford BT?

This isn't the BT ISP, this is BT PLC. Neither Sky nor Talk Talk has the financial muscle nor the experience to want to do this, it'd more likely be another major fixed line telco or Vodafone.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Neither Sky nor Talk Talk has the financial muscle nor the experience to want to do this, it'd more likely be another major fixed line telco or Vodafone.

Don't underestimate Murdoch, in either financial clout/ability or ambition...

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bill

bill@thinkbroadband.com

Do you really think Sky or CPW could afford BT?

if they've gone bust as hypothesised they won't be expensive.

Phil

MaxDSL - goes as fast as it can and doesn't read the line checker first.

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Are your kids pirates ? Limewire, Bearshare, Kazaa, BitTorrent, eMule are all tools of the trade.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

Do you really think Sky or CPW could afford BT?

if they've gone bust as hypothesised they won't be expensive.

So long as one ignores the minor issue of nice big pensions deficit.