Many talented Nokia engineers in highly skilled customer-facing positions for LTE customers in the U.S. were let go, at the New Jersey site in particular, on 7/19/2018. Any further details about what’s going on?? In January this year the System Engineering teams had been hit hard, now in this July wave they got essentially wiped out; but amazingly the customer facing jobs were cut deep as well for the first time. There’s got to be some sort of job positions shipping to other State / other country at play here?... Otherwise how will Nokia satisfy the highly demanding U.S. customers?
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https://legiscan.com/NJ/text/S3170/id/1826466/New_Jersey-2018-S3170-Introduced.html
SENATE, No. 3170
STATE OF NEW JERSEY
218th LEGISLATURE
INTRODUCED NOVEMBER 26, 2018
SYNOPSIS
Increases prenotification time and requires severance pay in certain plant closings, transfers, and mass layoffs.
a. Provide, ..., not less than [60] 90 days, or the period of time required pursuant to the federal "Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act," 29 U.S.C. s.2101 et seq.,
b. ...severance pay equal to one week of pay for each full year of employment.
- This act shall take effect immediately.
CAN WE LAY OFF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD PLEASE
ESPOO SMELLS LIKE P--paragraph}}}YOU FEEL ME
Exactly the same happened to Motorola employees when Nokia bought Motorola Wireless Infrastructure Business. In the U.S. almost everybody got laid off, jobs moved to China and Poland, closed and sold off Motorola's real estate. It looks like Nokia is using same playbook with ALU.
[Nokia worker (for the moment) in Murray Hill here.]
Nokia only bought ALU for its markets. They are literally throwing away all of the installed ALU eNodeB's and replacing them with the Nokia equivalents. They have almost no use for former-ALU R&D staff. Maintenance of legacy fALU products has been largely subcontracted out or sent to China. Other work for ongoing fALU projects is being sent mostly to Poland. I'm probably going to get the axe myself as soon as I'm done training my replacements. (What's worse is that they're friendly, and talented, and dammit, I like those engineers! It's a totally different story when you're handing your work over to someone you can tell is going to wreck it.)
One of the larger buildings at Murray Hill has been closed, and another was torn down last year. The space consolidation is still going on, so they can save on HVAC and maintenance costs.
It's clear that Nokia wants to get rid of as much North American staff as it can, and consolidate everything in Europe or China. Not to get too political here, but this is a direct result of two things: The French government blocked the sale of ALU to Nokia until Nokia agreed there would be essentially zero layoffs in France. And China is famous for its pay-to-play business model, where they can demand that if they buy a foreign company's big-ticket products, that some of the development and/or manufacturing must occur in China. America's hands-off attitude left ALU's US employees completely vulnerable, and the US continues to bear the brunt of the staff cuts.
Typo in the title: Should read “7/19/2018”