Employees confine Ericsson top-brass for service benefits

Local employees of telecom equipment maker Ericsson yesterday confined some of its senior officials to their office for 11 hours to press home their demand for voluntary retirement scheme before lay-offs.

The officials were let go at 8:30pm after the two sides agreed that the employees union will hold a video conference with the global headquarters of Ericsson at noon today, according to Lutfor Rahman, general secretary of the LM Ericsson Employees Union of Bangladesh.

Those who had been confined include Asheon Todd, country manager of of LM Ericsson Bangladesh; Abdus Salam, acting unit head; and Khairul Bashar, human resources manager. Their confinement came four days after the company sacked 100 employees.

The aggrieved employees took position outside the room of the country manager at their office in the Delvista Tower on Gulshan Avenue at 9:30am after a failed meeting between the two sides.

Ericsson Bangladesh has terminated 500 employees in the last few years. But none of them received any termination benefit, said leaders of the union. It now employs 276 people in the country.

“The employees were sacked without any prior notice,” Rahman told The Daily Star.

M Asaduzzaman, joint secretary of the union, said: “We have been continuing talks with the authorities for the last five months. Now we have been left with no other option but to go for movement.”

He said some telecom companies in Bangladesh also offered voluntary retirement scheme or termination benefit. “We have just demanded the same treatment.”

Sonia Aplin, head of marketing and communications for South East Asia, Oceania and India at Ericsson, said in an email: “As previously announced, Ericsson has made a number of operational changes to our organisation in Bangladesh, including headcount reductions, based on business needs and as part of our continuous efforts to increase efficiency.”

“All changes have been made and communicated to our impacted employees in strict compliance with local regulations and company policies, and in keeping with our core values of professionalism and respect,” she added.

Ericsson, a leading provider of telecommunications equipment and related services to mobile and fixed network operators in the world, provides services to almost the entire telecom sector in Bangladesh.

It plans to lay off 25,000 employees outside Sweden to cut costs.