Nearly 300 employees of Cable and Wireless Jamaica Limited (C&WJ) were served with redundancy notices yesterday.
The company says that the job cuts were part of a multi-national rationalisation programme throughout the region, aimed at improving efficiencies.
The list of 298 workers was comprised of at least 102 persons from the retail services, including the business offices, and 74 from the network services, including technicians and maintenance workers.
The University and Allied Workers Union (UAWU) represents 193 of the affected workers, the National Workers Union (NWU) 17, three are members of JAMASA (the Jamintel and Allied Staff Association) and 85 are supervisors represented by the Executive Staff Association (ESA).
The company has decided to close down its transport maintenance and repairs division and out-source the service.
The company said yesterday that the reports from several locations indicated that its operation was being affected by the refusal of some employees to leave their base until the list of those being made redundant was released.
UAWU vice-president Lambert Brown explained that the workers had not taken industrial action, but that some of them were "traumatised" by the way the company had conducted the exercise.
A dispute between the company and the unions over improvements in salaries and fringe benefits is still before the Industrial Disputes Tribunal (IDT).
This is the second major staff cut in under two years. In June 1999 a total of 300 workers, mostly in the engineering department were axed. The company blamed that job cut on the use of improved technology, the need to cut costs while improving efficiency, and on external factors such as a fall off in incoming international calls.
