Job cut fear grips GP employees
More than 600 permanent employees of Grameenphone might lose their jobs as the leading mobile phone operator is moving towards managing its network through a third party, said its employees' union yesterday.
Grameenphone Employees Union (GPEU) demanded immediate scrapping of the plan, running in the form of a “Common Delivery Centre” (CDC) project, and placed a 12-point demand for enhanced job security.
Last month, the operator advertised a request seeking quotations to outsource the network management operations, said Mia Md Shafiquer Rahman Masud, general secretary of the union, at a press conference at Dhaka Reporters Unity in the capital.
GP's parent company Telenor implemented similar projects in its ventures in Malaysia and Myanmar and jobs of a huge number of employees in those countries were terminated, the union said. “If GP can implement the CDC project in Bangladesh, only a handful of people will be required in the operator's technology team and more than 600 people will lose their jobs,” said Masud.
GP, however, said in an increasingly complex business environment, it needs to sharpen operational focus and embrace new operating models from time to time to extract the full benefit of new technologies.
“Jobs are constantly being redefined in the industry based on what the company needs to prepare for future business opportunities,” said the operator in a statement.
The operator said it would continue to train its employees to prepare them for a digitally transformed industry and workplace.
“The business is such that where we redefine jobs on the one front we create new job opportunities on the other. In an increasingly digital eco-system, Grameenphone has created hundreds of job opportunities through Tonic, Shoparu, GPAY, B2B, and GPAccelerator, to name just a few.”
The union said the operator was moving ahead with a new plan to implement another project named “2020”, which will bring down GP's workforce to less than 1,000 from the around 2,300 at present.
Since 2007, GP has terminated jobs of about 3,000 employees while several thousand have also left the company. Fazlur Rahman, GPEU president, was also present at the press conference.
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