T-Mobile Fires More Employees After Promising That Most Definitely Wouldn’t Happen After Their Last Merger
It's a tale as old as time. Two companies look to merge, and promise regulators that the new super-union will create unlimited, untold synergies. They insist repeatedly the consolidation most certainly won't raise prices, and that the megadeal will absolutely in no way result in layoffs.
Regulators rubber-stamp the deal, then, like clockwork, all of those things that the companies promised wouldn't happen, happen anyway. Nobody does anything about it, nobody learns anything from the experience, then the process is immediately repeated with the next big deal.
That was once again the story with the T-Mobile Sprint merger. Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. That never happens in the wake of telecom consolidation (something experts made repeatedly clear in testimony), and soon enough, the newly merged company was busy laying off 5,000 employees.
Over the last few weeks, the company has also been firing hundreds of duplicative engineers, and the comments by fired employees over at The Layoff aren't what you'd call kind:
T_mobile laid off hundreds of American workers yesterday and today while majority (> 60%) of engineering jobs are outsourced to India for the cheap labor which is directly hurting US workers. Employees who were working 18-20 years with legacy sprint and Tmobile lost their jobs without any notice in this blitz.
Again, T-Mobile promised this wouldn't happen, and has faced absolutely zero penalties for lying to regulators. Meanwhile, T-Mobile's 2015-era pesky upstart persona has largely faded, and the remaining three carriers have been working overtime to find creative new ways to nickel-and-dime users.
California regulators found that T-Mobile lied to gain deal approval. Reporters found the Trump FCC didn't even read the deal details before approving it. Reporters also found the Trump DOJ's antitrust boss" actively helped T-Mobile and Dish gain approval (the opposite of their, you know, jobs) by pretending Dish could build a fourth replacement network (that effort is going... poorly).
You can tell how little T-Mobile is worried about any kind of regulatory accountability (by either party) because the company hasn't even bothered deleting the 2019 post by former CEO John Legere claiming that critics were lying about the looming job losses:
it's unfortunate that those dedicated to protecting the status quo think it is okay to mislead and scare people into thinking that their made-up numbers" about jobs at the New T-Mobile are accurate...At the hearings, I raised my right hand and swore under oath to tell the TRUTH... and the truth is that the New T-Mobile will CREATE JOBS....we're going to need to create more jobs from day one... and every day thereafter.
Mindless telecom consolidation always leads to employment bloodshed. Such megadeals always result in less meaningful competition and, eventually, higher consumer prices, worse service, and weaker customer support. You can stave off some of it for a while, but Wall Street demands that consolidation inevitably be exploited. And the folks that always pay the price are consumers and employees.
The press generally finds post merger autopsies boring, which lets most of the policymakers who approved deals like this memory hole the fact they approved them. That lack of cultural memory in turn ensures the country learns absolutely nothing from experience, before lining up with a dumb look on our faces to do it all over again.