Nortel Networks will shed 330 jobs at its Belfast plant. Staff at the Canadian group's operations in the Republic have yet to hear what the latest round of global cutbacks will mean for them.
Mr Chris Conway, vice-president of Nortel Networks, at Monkstown on the outskirts of Belfast, yesterday broke the news to employees. Mr Conway said Northern Ireland, which specialised in optical systems, had not been singled out for job cuts. It was one of a number of plants that would be affected.
Trade union sources in the Republic indicated that discussions suggested there would be further cuts in Ireland.
The group currently employs around 2,000 people in the North and a further 720 people in the Republic - 660 people are employed in Galway with the remainder split between Nortel's Shannon and Dublin plants.
Trade union leaders and the group's employees in Northern Ireland had voiced fears about job security after Nortel's announced over two weeks ago it planned to cut a further 10,000 employees worldwide. The redundancy programme came on top of an earlier plan to cut 20,000 jobs across the Canadian telecoms group's global operations.
Mr Conway said the latest redundancies were being made because its key markets had failed to recover. Nortel Networks manufactures telecommunications transmission equipment, including fibre optic equipment, in the North, where at one stage it employed 2,400 people.
Until the beginning of this year the company had recruited heavily in Northern Ireland, in many instances wooing staff from other high-tech leaders with attractive salary and career prospects.
Mr Conway said the job cuts were necessary to realign cost structures in Northern Ireland with market demand. "This is a direct result of what is happening in the industry at this time and of the protracted downturn. I am hopeful that, if we make these redundancies now, it will position us with the right cost structure for the current level of business. "I wanted to let our employees know as soon as possible what the situation was because I don't want to drag the pain of this over the forthcoming holiday period," he said.
Many employees in Nortel Networks, as is common in many companies in Northern Ireland, take two weeks' holidays in July.
Mr Conway said he was confident that, in the long term, Nortel's optical networks business would prove to be a growth area in the future.
"In the meantime we will continue to monitor the business on an ongoing basis quarter by quarter.
"We expect that quarter three will be a difficult period because of this restructuring programme. We would hope to see some stability on the horizon but unfortunately nobody is in a position to forecast the future at this stage," he added.
Mr Conway said he could not guarantee there would not be further job losses at Monkstown but he hoped the right decisions had been taken at this stage to position the company for the future.
