Intel’s Irish staff are being told today if they are set to lose their jobs in a worldwide cutback that will see 12,000 employees shed from the company’s global workforce.
Intel's Ireland general manager Eamonn Sinnott informed employees in an email last Thursday that employees would be notified "within 72 hours of 4 May" if they were affected by the staff cuts.
However, workers are unlikely to learn for weeks the total number of jobs that will be lost across its operations in this country, despite reports over the weekend in the Sunday Business Post that Intel was preparing to lay off 420 Irish staff. It is understood they will not be informed of the total number of jobs targeted as they sit down to individual and group meetings with managers in the coming days.
The company employs more than 5,000 people in Ireland.
A spokeswoman for Intel in Ireland declined to comment on the weekend report, as did a spokesman for IDA Ireland. The initial plan was announced on April 19th.
The job-cuts plan comes as Intel grapples with falling demand for personal computers and looks to refocus on more profitable business, such as cloud computing, which allows people and businesses store and access data online.
Intel has about 4,500 employees and about 700 long-term contract workers in Ireland, mainly in the chipmaker’s largest site in Europe, outside Leixlip, CoKildare. Some 250 people work at a research and development facility in Shannon, Co Clare, and a further 350 in Cork.
As the redundancy programme is global, targeted job cuts are being filtered down through different business groups. It is understood Intel does not intend to announce an overall Irish jobs-reduction number as part of the process.
Applying the planned global job cuts on a pro-rata basis, Intel Ireland could expect to shed more than 550 staff and contractors, but, as The Irish Times has previously reported, it is understood the final number will be well short of this. Reports last week suggested the company was looking to thin its middle management and engineering ranks.
