Large Kansas City employer T-Mobile plans to cut 5,000 jobs nationwide, CEO says
Cellular giant T-Mobile announced Thursday it intends to lay off around 7% of its U.S. workforce across the country, putting around 5,000 employees out of a job.
“These shifts will impact… employees in locations across the country, primarily in corporate and back-office, and some technology roles,” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert wrote in a letter to employees Thursday. “The retail and consumer care experts who take care of our customers will not be impacted.”
He added that the layoffs will start this week and continue over the next five weeks. When reached for comment via email, the company said it is “not sharing (layoff) numbers by location.”
T-Mobile operates one of its U.S. headquarters in Overland Park on a sprawling corporate campus between Metcalf and Nall Avenues. T-Mobile’s corporate offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
When T-Mobile merged with Overland Park-based Sprint and took over the company’s offices in 2020, it pledged to “continue to be a major employer in the region.”
But T-Mobile cut upwards of 500 jobs at the Overland Park location as part of the merger. Its other U.S. headquarters is near Seattle.
“This is a large change, and an unusual one for our company,” Sievert wrote Thursday. “After this process is complete, I do not envision any additional widespread company reductions again in the foreseeable future.”
At the Overland Park offices, one employee who declined to be named said “everyone’s worried.”
“Other than that, I don’t know any of the details or specifics,” the employee said. “We just know it’s coming, that’s it. We don’t even know when.”
Another employee, who also declined to be named, said people in the Overland Park offices did not seem too worried. Some are legacy Sprint workers who have been through many ups and downs at the company, he told The Star.
At its height, Sprint was the area’s largest private employer, with more than 20,000 locals on the payroll.
But after years of spin-offs and reductions, its presence diminished. In 2020, T-Mobile ended up employing around 5,000 people at the Overland Park campus, down from Sprint’s reported 6,000 employees and 1,500 contractors the previous year.
“These layoffs, combined with cuts T-Mobile has been making since its merger with Sprint, show how hollow the company’s promises to be ‘a job creator from day 1,’ were,” said Beth Allen, an organizer with Communication Workers of America, a large labor union that represents some T-Mobile employees.
T-Mobile’s online jobs board shows that the company has posted 400 available jobs in the past seven days. Fifteen are in the Kansas City area, including Overland Park.
Do you have more questions about jobs and labor in Kansas City? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
This story was originally published August 24, 2023 at 1:23 PM.
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