Unions contest predictions on telecoms jobs

Date: 16/01/1997

By Chris Johnstone

TELECOMS unions are threatening a public row with the European Commission over a delayed report on the effects of telecoms liberalisation on jobs, claiming it has been rewritten to paint a wildly optimistic picture.

Luis Neves, of the Geneva-based Post, Telegraph, and Telephone International (PTTI) grouping of unions, says a draft summary of the report drawn up by a Paris-based firm of consultants for the Directorate-Generals for social affairs (DGV) and telecommunications (DGXIII) predicts that telecoms liberalisation will create up to 1.2 million new jobs in the EU by 2005.

At the same time, he claims, it underestimates job losses in dominant telephone companies by predicting only 275,000 redundancies by the same date.

“From my point of view, the summary was not very serious,” said Neves. “It is difficult to believe that up to 1.2 million jobs will be created. British Telecom alone has shed 110,000 jobs since 1990.”

The summary was issued to union and employee representatives on one of DGV's five telecoms committees in December last year. A final version is due next week, after almost a year's delay.

The report was first requested in 1990, eventually agreed in 1993, and should have been finished by May 1996.

Neves, who monitors the telecoms committees for the PTTI, alleges that Commission officials, anxious to send out a positive message on telecoms liberalisation, were unhappy with the consultancy firm's initial findings.

“My opinion is that the study was finished a long time ago.

The time has been spent on redrafting and rewriting,” he said, adding wryly: “I told the consultants responsible they deserved an award if their predictions for new jobs were met.”

Neves maintained the figures contained in the summary circulated in December bear no resemblance to predictions on employment trends from the PTTI's own affiliates.

He said the unions were planning to attach a dissenting disclaimer to the final report if it repeated the statistics presented in December and failed to explain where all the new jobs would come from.

Telecom company representatives have also attacked the lack of explanation of how the initial figures were arrived at, and are baffled as to why a final version of the study has taken so long to come out.

The Commission says it requested the evaluations to throw light on specific areas, so as to assist the policy-making process.

“We do not endorse them and they are not taken as a reflection of the Commission's views,” insisted a spokeswoman for Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn.

Officials suggested that the report would present a range of scenarios for the possible impact of liberalisation on jobs.

Neves said the numbers game was not the PTTI's main priority at the moment. Instead, it was seeking Commission backing for a special fund to help telecom companies retrain workers and conserve jobs.

“They are creating so many subsidiaries in new areas, it makes sense to train some of their workers being cut elsewhere,” he said, claiming the initiative had already won support from some operators such as the Belgian phone company Belgacom.

“The head of Belgacom has written a letter to Commission President Jacques Santer on the subject,” he added.