AT&T Istel Ltd, as reported briefly (CI No 2,081), will shed up to 375 jobs in the UK over the next six months. The company blames both the recession and an unwieldy management structure, which the redundancies are designed to trim. Istel – a management buyout from Rover Group later bought by AT&T – has a five-year rolling business plan and said that for the past two years it had failed to meet its revenue targets, but declined to give any indication of the size of the shortfall. With most of Istel’s electronic messaging portfolio being passed over to AT&T Easylink, the business AT&T acquired from Western Union Corp, the company has been left trying to sell systems integration services to the not particularly buoyant manufacturing, finance and retail, travel and leisure, and health care sectors. But in a written statement, AT&T Istel chief executive Richard Teague said It would be too easy to blame the recession for all of these losses… We need to be closer to our customers, and shorten lines of communications by removing layers of management from our organisational structure. Exactly which jobs will go has still be decided: Istel is following its usual policy of telling the affected employees as soon as possible. In October 1991 for example, an electronic mail message told staff that up to 250 jobs were to go. In the event, only 150 people lost their positions. However AT&T Istel said it expected the actual job losses this time to come out much closer to the estimated 375. The company says it will be setting up a voluntary redundancy scheme, but this will only soak up a minority of the places that have to be lost – if we get 30 voluntary redundancies, that will be quite good going, it said. The firm says its portfolio of services will be unaffected. Having added units on the continent, AT&T Istel now employs a total of 4,000 people, 2,200 of them in the UK, where the majority of the cuts will be.
