Union anger at HP plan to axe 9,000 jobs

Hewlett-Packard’s decision to cut 9,000 jobs worldwide in a bid to save up to $700 million per year has outraged unions, which claim they were not informed of the decision.

The IT vendor intends to slash the posts at part of the ongoing restructuring of its EDS services acquisition, which was purchased 20 months ago and is now called HP Services.
 
The company will spend $1 billion on consolidating and further automating its data centres, management platforms, networks, tools and applications, but will also invest in developing ‘private’ cloud computing infrastructure, application services and desktop-as-a-service offerings.
 
The move is expected to generate gross savings of $1 billion per year, with net savings of between $500 million and $700 million, but HP is currently staying tight lipped about where the axe will fall.
 
Jim Hanson, national officer at the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union told tech web site V3.co.uk that he was “deeply concerned” to hear of the planned redundancies, however.
 
“The UK arm of HP has already suffered its share of cuts in the last two years yet, since the acquisition of EDS, it has posted huge profits. We are very surprised to hear HP has announced this through the press without consulting us first,” he said.
 
HP has faced industrial action in the past over job cuts. A proposed series of two-day strikes by 1,000 staff from the company’s HP Services unit were called off at the eleventh hour at the end of March following talks involving the conciliation service, ACAS.
 
At the time, the two sides jointly committed to sign an agreement on job security and the avoidance of compulsory redundancies for PCS members working on government contracts among other things.
 
The move followed three stoppages earlier in the year by staff in five separate HP offices, who were working on IT contracts for the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Defence. They were angry about pay freezes that had been in place for over a year, even though HP had generated several billion dollars worth of profits.