The Labour Party is urging the Government to listen to calls for a comprehensive plan for the information and communications technology industry.
Communications and IT spokesperson Clare Curran says Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce must not ignore the Telecommunications Users' Association's plea for a strategic approach to the industry.
Ms Curran says the minister has been caught napping by Telecom's intention to get rid of 1500 workers and has no plan to deal with it.
In February, Telecom indicated it would cut hundreds of jobs to save money and stay competitive, although this week it said it is not in a position to discuss any future job cuts.
Wide range of jobs
Ms Curran told Morning Report she expects an announcement in the next two weeks and a range of specialist staff will lose their jobs, including engineers, designers, lawyers and accountants.
"These are people who have worked at Telecom probably for quite a long time," she says. "They are skilled people - they're the sort of people that we don't want to lose."
Telecom's corporate relations general manager, Andrew Pirie, says the company is still determining the final number of redundancies, but it will be in the hundreds.
He says a significant number of middle-management jobs will go, as well as technical, corporate and back-office jobs, and the process should be finished before the end of the financial year.
Ms Curran says many of those highly skilled workers are likely to move to Australia and will be lost to the New Zealand economy. She says the scale of the job losses is shocking and an indictment of the Government's failure to have a master strategy for the industry.
She says the information and communications technology (ICT) sector is an emerging powerhouse in the economy and a national digital plan is needed to provide cohesion and co-ordination throughout New Zealand.
Mr Joyce, who is also Employment Minister, says there are jobs for the Telecom staff who may soon be out of work.
He says there is demand for people in the ICT sector and about 1300 jobs are currently available in Auckland. He acknowledges, however, that new jobs are not being created as quickly as he had hoped.
Council of Trade Unions economist Bill Rosenberg says the Government should help affected Telecom workers with relocation costs.
Work may be hard to find - analyst
A telecommunications analyst believes those who lose their jobs at Telecom will find it difficult to get similar work.
Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Paul Brislen says about 7000 staff are employed at Telecom - more than double that of main rival Vodafone.
Mr Brislen says the job cuts are not surprising, as the company needs to make changes to stay competitive, and he told Morning Report he isn't confident that workers will find similar jobs in the sector.
"That's going to be rather difficult inside New Zealand, predominantly because Vodafone has just bought TelstraClear.
"The demand for staff on that side of the fence is dwindling as they restructure themselves, and when you take one of the competitors out of the mix at that level, it does mean that it's rather difficult to stay put."
Mr Brislen says Telecom has too many staff on executive salaries - which new chief executive Simon Moutter appears to be addressing. Under previous chief executive Paul Reynolds, he says, it was a culture of spending big money and hiring a lot of staff.
