This Monday, Telefónica transferred its figure for functional surplus of jobs to the unions, in view of the application of an Employment Regulation File (ERE). The excess amounts to 5,124 positions, of which 4,085 correspond to Telefónica España, 954 to Telefónica Móviles and 81 to Telefónica Soluciones de Informática y Comunicación.
The company has offered these figures when the ERE tables of each of the subsidiaries were established. Those affected will be equivalent to a third of the more than 16,500 workers covered by the different employment agreements in Spain.
To justify the cut, Telefónica alludes to objective causes of a productive, organizational and technical nature. The objective is to "adapt" the different subsidiaries to the "demanding process of transformation and adaptation that the new digital era requires," he says in a statement.
The impact of the workforce reduction is planned for people born in 1968 and previous years, that is, over 55 years old, who have accumulated a minimum of 15 years of seniority in the company, as explained by the unions.
The company has not yet set the volume of cancellations that will be included in the ERE. The high functional surplus, he assures, can be addressed through various measures, which also include the retraining and change of activity of employees through 'upskilling' or 'reskilling'. There will also be internalizations and withdrawals.
UGT responds to these approaches by ensuring that “there will be no agreement in the ERE if there is no agreement in the agreement that protects guarantees and stability.” It will also defend policies of "reinternalization of functions" and "reskilling" to ensure the employability of the workforce and moderate the impact.
The next meeting between the company and workers will be held on December 11. In October, Telefónica already announced that it would lighten the workforce in view of the closure next year of the copper business and that it would launch a new Incentivized Exit Plan (PSI) for a maximum of 5,000 employees and in which it expected an assignment of some 2,500 people.
This PSI, which has already been ruled out, has been the way in which the company has facilitated the departure of 11,900 workers in the last seven years. The ERE in place is the first to be applied since José María Álvarez-Pallete assumed the presidency of the company in 2016.
