T-Mobile Fires More Employees After Promising That Most Definitely Wouldn’t Happen After Their Last Merger
from the who-could-have-possibly-predicted-it dept
It’s a tale as old as time. Two companies look to merge, and promise regulators that the new super-union will create unlimited, untold synergies. They insist repeatedly the consolidation most certainly won’t raise prices, and that the megadeal will absolutely in no way result in layoffs.
Regulators rubber-stamp the deal, then, like clockwork, all of those things that the companies promised wouldn’t happen, happen anyway. Nobody does anything about it, nobody learns anything from the experience, then the process is immediately repeated with the next big deal.
That was once again the story with the T-Mobile Sprint merger. Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. That never happens in the wake of telecom consolidation (something experts made repeatedly clear in testimony), and soon enough, the newly merged company was busy laying off 5,000 employees.
Over the last few weeks, the company has also been firing hundreds of duplicative engineers, and the comments by fired employees over at The Layoff aren’t what you’d call kind:
T_mobile laid off hundreds of American workers yesterday and today while majority (> 60%) of engineering jobs are outsourced to India for the cheap labor which is directly hurting US workers. Employees who were working 18-20 years with legacy sprint and Tmobile lost their jobs without any notice in this blitz.
Again, T-Mobile promised this wouldn’t happen, and has faced absolutely zero penalties for lying to regulators. Meanwhile, T-Mobile’s 2015-era pesky upstart persona has largely faded, and the remaining three carriers have been working overtime to find creative new ways to nickel-and-dime users.
California regulators found that T-Mobile lied to gain deal approval. Reporters found the Trump FCC didn’t even read the deal details before approving it. Reporters also found the Trump DOJ’s “antitrust boss” actively helped T-Mobile and Dish gain approval (the opposite of their, you know, jobs) by pretending Dish could build a fourth replacement network (that effort is going… poorly).
You can tell how little T-Mobile is worried about any kind of regulatory accountability (by either party) because the company hasn’t even bothered deleting the 2019 post by former CEO John Legere claiming that critics were lying about the looming job losses:
it’s unfortunate that those dedicated to protecting the status quo think it is okay to mislead and scare people into thinking that their made-up “numbers” about jobs at the New T-Mobile are accurate…At the hearings, I raised my right hand and swore under oath to tell the TRUTH… and the truth is that the New T-Mobile will CREATE JOBS….we’re going to need to create more jobs from day one… and every day thereafter.
Mindless telecom consolidation always leads to employment bloodshed. Such megadeals always result in less meaningful competition and, eventually, higher consumer prices, worse service, and weaker customer support. You can stave off some of it for a while, but Wall Street demands that consolidation inevitably be exploited. And the folks that always pay the price are consumers and employees.
The press generally finds post merger autopsies boring, which lets most of the policymakers who approved deals like this memory hole the fact they approved them. That lack of cultural memory in turn ensures the country learns absolutely nothing from experience, before lining up with a dumb look on our faces to do it all over again.
Filed Under: competition, consolidation, layoffs, regulatory capture, telecom
Companies: t-mobile
Comments on “T-Mobile Fires More Employees After Promising That Most Definitely Wouldn’t Happen After Their Last Merger”
The reasons why no one says anything every time this happens is because they are never affected (having been paid off anyway to keep quiet. After all, it’s only taxpayers money!) and they don’t give a flyin fuck anyway!
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Re: Does this Phage ever shut up about Trump?
Seriously you have TDS. Why are you so dumb
Re: Re:
Claims facts not in evidence.
Administrations (e.g.) involved in shit relevant to the subject get named. Always been the same.
its stated
They created jobs.
But not in the USA.
And how much of the stock shares went up in value?
As Angela Lansbury never put it:
Tale as old as time
Song as old as rhyme
T-Mobile’s big lies
They've long learned the only thing that counts
Regulators rubber-stamp the deal, then, like clockwork, all of those things that the companies promised wouldn’t happen, happen anyway. Nobody does anything about it, nobody learns anything from the experience, then the process is immediately repeated with the next big deal.
You are giving everyone involved way more benefit of the doubt than is appropriate.
Companies have learned that if they throw enough money and other ‘perks’ at the right people then those people will support them and look the other way.
Those people have learned that if they support the companies the companies will support them in return, financially and/or otherwise.
If ‘nobody learns anything from the experience’ it’s because they’ve already learned everything they care to ages past.
Mergers are about synergies
In the best case it means being able to remove duplicate workloads (meaning layoffs) in order to free resources for research and development. Research and development is far more expensive than less qualified work, so the result will still be a net loss of jobs, with long-term prospects of better market-viability, meaning that other companies will have to shutter before yourself.
Which is good long-term. But since the other companies shutter, the net payoff for society in terms of jobs is still negative and there is no point in supporting this kind of market consolidation.
In addition, research and development scales to a whole company. Deployment and customer service doesn’t: you need the same number of operators to serve the same number of customers. And those jobs dominate the payrolls. Any savings here are only achievable by cutting services, and the only reason mergers help here is by making it impossible to change to other providers because of abysmal service.
Again, no point in supporting any of that.
Still…why?
Nobody cares about the employee loss except the employees and their families.
They kept their customer promise of not changing rates. That promise remains as stated.
The big question for me, as a T-Mobile user, is Wtf they did this for!
I have yet to figure out how merging the best service in the country, T-Mobile, with the just-barely second-worst company was a benefit to anyone.
What did they gain? Besides the name of a terrible bag of crap.
The. And now it just appears pointless!
Re:
Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean nobody else does.
It’s a benefit to the executives and shareholders, because with reduced competition, they can lay off thousands of people, cut the quality of services, and don’t have to worry about losing customers.