Vodafone asks nearly all of its 2800 staff if they want redundancy

Brian from New Lynn

"Voluntary redundancy gives employees the option to elect to leave the business for personal reasons, and to receive redundancy compensation." Around 600 front line call centre and retail staff "were exempted from this offer to avoid any disruption to customer service while we work through our company-wide review of our operating model," Gieck said. She added that the voluntary redundancy offer was separate to compulsory redundancies that will affect a so far unknown number of the telco's 2800 staff. Insiders have told there is a broad expectation that the voluntary and compulsory redundancy processes will see around 400 staff culled. However, new chief executive Jason Paris has emphasised there is no set number. It won't be fixed until the review wraps up at the end of this month. Last week, Unite Union organiser Shirley Wang told the Herald that 50 of her members who worked at a Vodafone NZ contact centre were in the gun. She expected their jobs to be offshored. A "climate of fear and anxiety" had been created by the restructure process, Wang said. "There will be no closures of New Zealand call centres as an outcome of this process," Paris said. However, Paris did early acknowledge the possibility of some contact centre roles being offshored, saying: "As a proud and passionate New Zealander my preference is to keep roles in NZ, but when the customer service is the same or better and at a much lower cost then it's tough to ignore this option. Just to clarify that in these overseas call centres we pay the agents well based on their local market and cost of living."
===========================================================