Deutsche Telekom has axed 4,000 U.S. jobs this year, despite T-Mobile pledge

Ever since T-Mobile merged with Sprint in the dark days of the pandemic, managers must have been regretting the claim that a beefed-up company would have more employees than the two constituents added together. It came from none other than Timotheus Höttges, the boss of German parent Deutsche Telekom, and clearly implied a net gain in headcount post-merger. This “jobs-positive from Day One” pledge was made to overcome political opposition to the controversial deal – seen as bad for consumers and workers alike.

It quickly turned out to be total BS, an American might say. As first reported by Light Reading, T-Mobile had 52,000 full- and part-time employees on its payroll in 2018, when the deal was announced, while Sprint had 28,500. By the end of 2020, after the transaction had gone through, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed there were 75,000 employees at the new and fatter T-Mobile. Across the two companies, some 5,500 jobs had been removed since the merger plans were revealed.

This might have been forgivable. Between 2020 and 2021, there was no change in the figure, according to T-Mobile’s SEC filings. Deutsche Telekom’s financial reports told a similar story. Indicating full-time roles only, they showed there were 71,094 such US positions in December 2021, just 209 fewer than it recorded one year earlier. But the German telco’s numbers for September 2022 point to thousands of additional cuts this year.

Out today, they show a net reduction of 4,230 full-time jobs over the first nine months of 2022, leaving its American business with 66,864 full-time employees at the end of September. Far from being a “jobs-positive” actor on the other side of the Atlantic, Deutsche Telekom appears to have cut more deeply into its US workforce than any other part of its business bar the small group development function.

Its explanation? “The total number of full-time equivalent employees in the United States operating segment decreased by 5.9% from September 30, 2022 compared to December 31, 2021 – primarily due to international headcount rationalization to manage costs,” it said in the latest document.

Euphemisms and more BS

International headcount rationalization, as Deutsche Telekom puts it, is normally what happens when two similar businesses come together. No mobile operator needs two core network managers, as one observer previously said to Light Reading. Even as it promised to create jobs from the outset, Deutsche Telekom had prattled on about realizing $6 billion in “synergies” (usually a euphemism for cuts) through “store consolidation,” “site decommissioning” and other such measures.

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