Telefónica has initiated a new restructuring process that could become one of the most important labor adjustments in recent years in the telecommunications sector. The company has informed the main unions of its intention to implement an employment regulation plan (ERE) that will involve thousands of departures and will affect several of its subsidiaries in Spain.
Although the final number of workers who will leave the company has not yet been defined, initial estimates project a reduction of between 6,000 and 7,000 employees, figures that could vary during the negotiation phase. An important process lies ahead to determine both the scope of the adjustment and the economic conditions of those affected.
Which are the seven Telefónica subsidiaries with massive layoffs?
The company’s redundancy plan is not limited to a single area of activity, but will be extended to seven companies of the Telefónica group in Spain. The proposal submitted to the unions includes Telefónica de España, Telefónica Móviles, Telefónica Soluciones, Telefónica, Telefónica Global Solutions, Telefónica Innovación Digital and Movistar+.
Each of these subsidiaries is part of the company’s operational core in the country, so the adjustment will have a cross-cutting impact on various business lines.
Telefónica’s management and union representatives will meet on November 24 and 25 to form the negotiating committees that will define the framework of the process. From that moment on, a 30-day period will begin in which both parties will have to agree on how many workers will finally leave and under what conditions.
The company intends to close the agreement before the end of the year in order to allocate the cost of the ERE to the 2025 accounts, a year that will be marked by the deployment of its new strategic plan.
What are the union demands to mitigate mass unemployment?
The unions have made their position clear from the outset. Both UGT and Comisiones Obreras and Sumados-Fetico consider it essential that the process be addressed jointly in all the subsidiaries affected, reject any attempt to fragment the agreement and demand that, in parallel, the negotiating tables of all the collective bargaining agreements be opened.
Its main request is that these agreements be valid until 2030, in line with the Transform & Grow strategic plan that Telefónica will implement between 2026 and the same year.
At the same time, the unions insist that the voluntary nature must be the main pillar of the ERE. The unions also demand that the economic conditions be equal or even better than those of the 2024 ERE, which allowed the departure of 3,421 employees through early retirements and voluntary redundancies.
In that process, the requirement for eligibility was to be 56 years of age or older and to have been with the company for at least 15 years, and compensation was up to 68% of salary depending on age brackets. The unions want these guarantees to be the starting point for the new agreement.
A multimillionaire ERE: how much will it cost Telefónica?
The economic impact of the ERE will be significant. In the 2024 adjustment, Telefónica provisioned around
This calculation includes not only severance payments, but also the social costs arising from the terminations. Due to the so-called “Telefónica clause”, which has been in force since the massive redundancy program of 2011, the company must assume the costs associated with unemployment and Social Security until retirement, instead of transferring them to the State.
