Kris Carlon / Android Authority
TL;DR
- There will be another 5,000 T-Mobile layoffs.
- That’s 7% of the company’s workforce, mostly from executive positions.
- T-Mobile said it would keep its pre-merger employee numbers when it acquired Sprint.
When T-Mobile acquired Sprint in 2020, the combined company had about 80,000 employees. One of the things T-Mo committed to when it was pleading to regulators to let it close the Sprint merger was that it would keep employee numbers at that level or higher forever.
“This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs,” said John Legere, T-Mobile’s CEO at the time. “The New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter.”
Legere also said, “In total, New T-Mobile will have more than 11,000 additional employees on our payroll by 2024 compared to what the combined standalone companies would have!” That would mean about 91,000 employees by 2024.
However, that hasn’t really happened. As soon as 2021, the company had already shed about 5,000 jobs, bringing it down to 75,000 total (per The Verge). Now, today, it’s announced it will shed another 5,000 jobs, or about 7% of its total remaining workforce (per Bloomberg). These terminated positions will mostly be executives and tech-related roles. Current T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said these new T-Mobile layoffs were in direct response to the cost of attracting and retaining customers being “materially more expensive than it was just a few quarters ago.”
Fortunately, Sievert said there are no plans for further layoffs in 2023. However, at this rate, it seems very unlikely that T-Mobile will meet its 91,000-employee promise by 2024, if ever.
This announcement comes on the heels of the company launching the new Go5G Next plan. Although it offers yearly phone upgrades for subscribers, it also will likely include a new $10 fee for any free lines long-time subscribers earned over the years.
