Campus

It’s transition day for 2,000 Kansas City-area Sprint -- now Ericsson -- employees. But apparently the transition doesn’t really change much.

Today, Sprint employees involved in the Network Advantage deal with Ericsson become official Ericsson employees, but they’ll come to the same office and do their same jobs.

“The employees aren’t physically moving at all, and their job responsibilities are the same, so it’s really just a matter of transitioning to another company,” said Sprint spokesperson Melinda Tiemeyer.

Even though it's expected, it's still tough when colleagues and coworkers start walking out the door.

Believe me, we know this here at the Sprint Connection.

Word began filtering out Wednesday that some of Sprint Nextel's planned job cuts will hit the product and content group and the network operations center in Reston hard.

The quest for cost savings could be leading Sprint executives to dramatic outsourcing moves that would shift thousands of employees to other companies such as IBM,Alcatel Lucent or Ericsson. A substantial number of jobs could be lost in the process.

The practice, sometimes referred to as "re-badging," has been a commonly used cost-cutting method at Sprint in the past and more recently at other telecommunications companies such as Embarq.

The process involves removing employees directly from Sprint's payroll and paying a vendor to take over certain business units or various technical jobs such as monitoring a network. The vendors often hire some, but not all of the former Sprint employees.

By Dan Margolies
The Kansas City Star

A one-time independent contractor for Sprint Nextel Corp. has pleaded guilty to concealment of a felony arising from a kickback scheme involving two Sprint employees.

William Collum admitted Thursday that he learned the two now-former employees had passed along inside information to a software consulting firm, Four Corners Telecommunications Corp., known as Four C, which was in contract negotiations with Sprint.

Nonetheless, he went along with Four C’s decision to continue discussions with one of the employees, now-former Sprint long-distance manager Mary Elizabeth Drew, who was demanding additional money for her help.

Mighty winds are buffeting the Sprint campus in Overland Park.

We are not talking, this time, about merger winds. Or even overblown pronouncements from executives or pundits.

Sprint and Kansas City Power & Light are trumpeting the fact that they have joined forces to clean up the environment by embracing renewable energy.

Sprint’s sprawling 200-acre campus in Overland Park obtains the majority of its power from KCP&L's Spearville, Kan., Wind Energy Facility.

Negative reputations, fairly deserved or not, can be a tough thing for job hunters to overcome.

Our colleague, Diane Stafford, the workplace and careers columnist at The Kansas City Star, writes on her Workspace blog today about what she’s heard about Sprint workers from recruiters and other companies in the area.

Sprint workers tend to have big salaries that many other area companies find it tough to match. Plus, some companies question how hard the former Sprint employees had to work to get those big paychecks, according to comments Diane has heard.

These challenges are not necessarily exclusive to former Sprint workers, but job hunters with Sprint on their resume stand out because of their large numbers and the company's dominating presence in the area.

This is a situation that could affect hundreds of former Sprint workers, considering that the company is completing about 4,000 job cuts, with many of them occurring in the Kansas City area.