Mobile telecommunications firm, MTN Nigeria, has sacked
about 280 of its workers across its different operational units.
It
was gathered that the affected workers left the company on Friday, having
embraced the firm’s offer of voluntary disengagement, which was offered to
employees who had served for a minimum of five years.
It
was further learnt that some of the affected employees had been with the
company since its inception in the country in 2001 and that the management felt
that their knowledge of the industry had become obsolete.
A
source in the company told our correspondent on Monday, “MTN offered a package
to workers who have stayed for five years and above a voluntary exit package
because it felt that most of them are not able to contribute much to the
development of the company going forward.
“If,
for instance, you have kids, you can’t compare the knowledge you have about the
mobile phone with what they can do about telecoms services; they are more
dexterous; so, the company wants to hire younger people who can keep pace with
evolving trends in the industry instead of retaining those whose knowledge is
limited to what they knew 16 years ago.”
It
was learnt that the company had communicated its plans to the workers and
offered that those who embraced the voluntary exit package would be generously
compensated, but was forced to include some long-standing members of staff when
it could not meet the 25 per cent cut in personnel that it had planned.
To
compensate the workers who opted for voluntary exit and those forced out, it
was gathered that the company offered to pay them three weeks’ total wages
multiplied by the number of years they had spent in the firm, in addition to
the balances in their Retirement Savings Accounts under the Contributory
Pension Scheme.
However,
this has not gone down well with the majority of the workers, who had expected
a generous payout like the firm approved for engineers whose services were
transferred to service providers when MTN decided to outsourced some non-core
services to other firms.
Efforts
to get an official explanation about the development proved abortive as the
spokesperson for MTN Nigeria, Funso Aina, could not be reached for comments on
Monday
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Business