Nokia: puts a support package in place for workers laid off after mass redundancies

As expected, Nokia’s acquisition of Franco-American rival Alcatel-Lucent has had significant social consequences. Although the Finnish group did not provide any global figures beyond 1,300 job cuts for Finland, 400 for France and 1,400 for Germany, Bloomberg reported that redundancy notices could affect between 10,00-15,000 of the group’s 104,000 total headcount. At the same time, in a bid to temper the impact of the lay offs, Nokia announced that it would restart its Bridge program. The Bridge program is seen as the standard for assisting employees and regions impacted by redundancies. Bridge was used to manage the some ten thousand lay offs at the company between 2011 and 2013 when Nokia was preparing to sell the mobile phone business to Microsoft.