One of the main arguments that opponents of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger make is that it will lead to job losses. T-Mobile says that the combined company “will be a job creator”, but now a group of T-Mo employees want a guarantee that their job will be safe if the merger is completed.

A group called T-Mobile Workers United delivered a letter for Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges this week during a meeting with employee representatives on the DT supervisory board. While Höttges wasn’t at that meeting, the reps promised to deliver it to him.

In the letter, T-Mobile Workers United asks that T-Mo parent company Deutsche Telekom make three commitments related to jobs and the New T-Mobile:

“1. Secure our jobs without cuts to compensation.
2. Bring back outsourced jobs from overseas and in the USA; and
3. Respect our rights on the job by stopping management interference with our right to organize.”

During the meeting in which the letter was handed off, T-Mobile Workers United reps discussed concerns that they have about the merger and about “T-Mobile management’s ongoing interference with their efforts to join together to form a union.”

T-Mobile Workers United is a group that includes hundreds of call center reps, retail associates, and technicians. It is an organizing local of Communications Workers of America in partnership with workers at Deutsche Telekom who are members of the German union ver.di.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere has said that the New T-Mobile “will be jobs positive from day one and every day thereafter.” He’s said that the company plans to invest nearly $40 billion in network and business expansion in the first three years following the merger’s completion in an effort to build out 5G infrastructure, customer care resources, and the retail footprint.

Meanwhile, the CWA argues that the T-Mobile-Sprint merger will lead to 30,000 jobs lost as a result of closing duplicative stores and headquarters functions. “None of the developments over the past months regarding the merger have changed CWA’s fundamental assessment of this as a job-killing merger,” the group says.

Source: Communications Workers of America (1), (2)