Deutsche Telekom: Creation of service companies by July

As announced, Deutsche Telekom will transfer the business operations of the Technical Customer Service, Technical Infrastructure and Call Center areas to three legally independent service companies on July 1 at the latest. The company is still interested in coming to an agreement with ver.di to arrange future-proof and demand-based collective agreements for the new companies.



“We are inviting Mr. Schröder to return to the negotiating table,” Karl-Gerhard Eick, Deutsche Teleom CFO and chief negotiator appealed to ver.di. “We should use the shared responsibility we have for our employees and Deutsche Telekom’s sustainability to find a workable compromise.”



Deutsche Telekom wants to offer its customers improved service with its own employees. The Group’s internal service companies will focus on their own area of business and act quickly and flexibly in the customers’ interests. The T-Punkt-Vertriebsgesellschaft retail stores subsidiary has already followed this strategy successfully and is now taking on new staff.



The collective agreements in place at T-Mobile CS and Vivento Technical Services will be applied to the new companies. This means that the employment conditions laid down in these agreements will apply to the employees transferred to the service company in the middle of the year. The conditions differ from Deutsche Telekom’s collective agreement and are less favorable for employees in some respects.



The three Group companies are Deutsche Telekom Technischer Service GmbH, Deutsche Telekom Netzproduktion GmbH and Deutsche Telekom Kundenservice GmbH.



Deutsche Telekom is still willing to discuss and negotiate on its most recent offer. An agreement could be reached with ver.di, for example, on considerably longer protection against dismissal than is the case for the three service companies at present.



“We have offered to guarantee no redundancies until the end of 2011 in the negotiations,” said Thomas Sattelberger, Chief Human Resources Officer and Labor Director at Deutsche Telekom. “Offering our employees and their families such a high level of security is not a matter of course and is almost a one-off in Germany. We are doing our best to keep 50,000 jobs within the Group.”



This will, however, only be possible in the long-term if Deutsche Telekom succeeds in overcoming the huge competitive pressure. This requires competitive costs structures as well as excellent products and service, better processes and high-performance IT. We need to take action in all these areas to secure Deutsche Telekom’s existence and retain good and sustainable jobs.



Deutsche Telekom is endeavoring to keep the impact of the ongoing strike on its customers to an absolute minimum. The company is relying on deploying employees and civil servants flexibly and outsourcing services to external service providers to do so. “The impact of the strike is within the limits we expected at present. We have identified delays in the installation of lines requiring service technicians,” said Timotheus Höttges, Board member responsible for T-Com, Sales & Service.