Thursday 9 October 2008

EDS confirms loss of UK posts

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised by this week’s announcement that the HP job cuts announced last month will fall on 3,378 posts in the UK arm of EDS (see last month’s post EDS/HP to shed 8% of staff – going off-shore?.

Understandably, the Public and Commercial Services Union has condemned this - see
here – (even though they represent less than 10% of all EDS staff).

However, my understanding is that the job cuts will happen over the next two years, and that many are expected to come from its current voluntary redundancy exercise, which was already in place prior to the announcement. Also, not all the 3,378 posts are currently filled, and I’m told the cut in posts reflects some of EDS’s pessimism on growth over the next two years, rather than a dramatic reduction in business.

Either way, as I noted last month, this move also represents a gradual and continual move of EDS workload to off-shore operations. It will be interesting to see if this move affects its business with UK Public Sector customers, who seem to like the cost benefits, but suffer from negative staff and citizen comments whenever such moves take place.

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