Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) said it was undertaking the migration of landline subscribers of Digital Telecommunications Philippines (Digitel) to improve and widen its services.
“A large part of Digitel’s landline facilities consists of the old telephone network acquired from the government. These were installed over 30 years ago. They need to be replaced,” Digitel spokesperson Reuben Pangan said in a statement.
“From the standpoint of public service, it is better to simply retire the old Digitel network and migrate our customers to PLDT, which has just completed its network transformation,” he added.
He said Digitel had sought and obtained the approval of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) at every phase of the migration process.
Pangan said that because of its decision to migrate its landline subscribers in its franchise areas in northern, central, and southern Luzon to PLDT, Digitel had to implement a redundancy program for employees.
“This is clearly a case where redundancy is unavoidable. The regular jobs in Digitel are simply no longer there because the Digitel network is being decommissioned,” he stressed.
The redundancy program submitted to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) was completed on March 15.
More than 80 percent of Digitel employees had agreed to accept the redundancy package which was about twice the amount required by law plus two-year medical coverage, according to a company statement.
Some Digitel workers belonging to the Digitel Employees Union, however, refused the package and have been staging protest action outside the PLDT headquarters in Makati.
The union members were citing a decision issued on Jan. 21 by the Supreme Court, which ordered PLDT to negotiate with them. They alleged that PLDT continues to defy this order.
Pangan pointed that there were 70 Digitel employees who refused to accept the redundancy package and less than 30 were participating in the picket.
PLDT and Sun Cellular have hired about 390 of the affected Digitel staff as regular employees while alternative employment through service providers was also an option given to other former Digitel employees.