Solidarity demands ‘reckless’ Telkom retrenchments be put on ice
Union Solidarity said in a statement on Thursday that it sent a letter to Telkom asking for a moratorium to be placed on what it called “forced retrenchments”, which could potentially see 3 000 jobs cut.
Telkom issued a Section 189 notice to start the process of consultation to restructure its business, citing a need to gear the company for future competitiveness.
Solidarity CEO Dirk Hermann said in the statement that there was no evidence that cutting thousands of jobs could secure Telkom’s financial stability and that rather, the evidence pointed to such a move potentially having the opposite effect.
‘Reckless, merciless’
“A company cannot pay its executive team more than R100m and then get rid of 3 000 of its workforce. That is reckless and, given the labour market retrenched workers have to face, it is merciless. In the previous financial year Telkom’s CEO, Sipho Maseko, alone took home a full R23m,” Hermann.
Hermann said the plans to retrench confirmed that the company had failed to retrain staff so that Telkom could grow faster in areas such as mobile services, at the expense of employees who had helped the company develop to its current level in the first place.
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