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.
A program that was put through its paces during the 2011-2013 restructuring period. The Bridge program is based on ‘Nokia’ values in terms of an awareness of the place a company holds in the local economy, workers’ involvement, as well as involvement by all other stake holders. Nokia’s board of directors decided that the employment return rate for those whose positions were done away with would be the program’s success/failure indicator. Based on this the program leaders defined five pathways for each worker losing their job:
- Finding a new job within Nokia: this involves seeking talent internally for new employment positions within the company.
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