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Reports suggest that the Italian operator is in discussions with Italian workers unions to expand a current early retirement scheme, seeking to cut a further 2,200 jobs as part of wider cost-saving measures
According to reports from Reuters today, Italian incumbent operator TIM is nearing an agreement with national trade unions to introduce another early retirement scheme, aiming to trim its domestic workforce by further 2,200 staff by 2024.
Since the start of the year, new TIM CEO Pietro Labriola has been masterminding a series of cost-cutting measures, including job cuts, designed to save the operator €1 billion by 2024.
TIM is languishing in one of the most competitive telecoms markets in Europe, with the company’s high staff costs compared to rivals listed as a major headache for the operator’s bottom line. TIM reportedly spends around 27% of its operating expenditure on staff wages.
When this strategic shift was first announced at the start of the year, reports indicated that up to 20% of TIM’s roughly 42,500 Italian staff members could be at risk. Subsequent decisions, however, have so far been less severe.
In June, the operator announced that would introduce a voluntary retirement scheme, having reached an agreement with various union, including SLC-CGIL, FISTel-CISL, UILCom-UIL, and UGL Telecomunicazioni. The scheme would seek to cut 1,200 jobs by November 2022.
Now, it seems that TIM is looking further ahead as it plans yet more cuts, suggesting that between 2,200 and 2,300 staff members could leave the company between September 2022 and February 2024.
The sources suggest that TIM would aim to hire up to 550 additional workers during this time, as well as reducing the working hours of its domestic workforce by between 10% and 25%.
This means that currently TIM has a plan to reduce its Italian workforce by around 3,400 members by 2024 – a far cry from the roughly 8,000 jobs it was initially rumoured to be seeking to eliminate.
That said, further job cuts could still follow, presumably largely dependent on the levels of success of the company’s division into separate enterprise services and network units, as well as its merger with Open Fiber.
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