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T-Mobile USA announced that it will reduce its number of call centers from 24 to 17. Approximately 3,300 employees are located in the call centers that will close, but the company plans to increase its staff by 1,400 at its other locations, reducing the net loss to 1,900. Affected staff members have been invited to relocate. The company also announced plans to restructure its operations in the second quarter in order to lower total costs.

Lothar Schröder, director of telecom of the German union ver.di that represents Deutsche Telekom employees in Germany, called on the company to take the interests of both the company and the employees into consideration, and said that “the closing of parts of a company and the laying off of thousands of employees has never led to success or to sustainable solutions”. Schröder considered the company’s offer to transfer employees to different call centers as not very serious and called it a “deception package”, since no one would expect people to “wander thousands of kilometers with their families into uncertainty” as the risk of losing their jobs would persist.



The company claimed the job cuts were necessary to fund its two-year, USD 4 billion network upgrade to high-speed mobile broadband, 4G LTE. While T-Mobile hopes that the upgrades will halt the customer defection rate – 3.1%, or more than triple that of the largest provider – the move still leaves the company two years behind its rivals AT&T and Verizon.



AT&T planned to buy T-Mobile USA last year, but ended its effort after resistance from the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commissions.



T-Mobile USA currently has 36,000 employees.