AT&T targets Slovakia jobs in latest cost-cutting drive

More than 200 roles at risk as US telecoms group shifts work to lower-cost locations and invests in AI.The American telecommunications group AT&T is preparing a significant round of redundancies at one of its operations centres in Slovakia.

Staff at the company’s Košice branch in eastern Slovakia were reportedly called to a meeting on Monday, 13 April, after which their work schedules were abruptly cleared. One employee, who asked to remain anonymous, told Denník N that between 200 and 230 workers had their shifts altered to attend the briefing, after which they were marked “offline”.

According to Korzár, citing the local labour office, up to 340 jobs are at risk.
The company did not provide a comment on the situation.

AT&T operates in Slovakia from centres in Košice and Bratislava, employing around 2,000 people. In 2019, the company employed more than 3,300 people in Slovakia.
The company entered the Slovak market in 2006, providing global customer support and IT infrastructure services.

Warnings and terms of redundanciesRumours of job losses had circulated internally for weeks. Employees point to earlier changes this year — including the cancellation of Sunday shifts and requests to update personal contact details — as signals that redundancies were imminent.

The union organisation uniJa, which represents workers at multinational firms including AT&T, confirmed the development. It said it had been informed — albeit with limited detail — of an organisational restructuring affecting Košice from 1 July.

Documents seen by the media indicate employees will be made redundant on the grounds of organisational change. Contracts are expected to end on 30 June, with staff receiving salary compensation through the notice period and severance equivalent to three months’ average pay. Employees are not expected to work beyond mid-April.
Those most affected are understood to be frontline customer service staff handling inbound calls, as well as their managers. A smaller number of roles may remain in business support units, though employees say these could also be at risk over time.

Workers attribute the cuts to a combination of rising costs and structural changes. Lower-cost service centres in countries such as Egypt and India have expanded, while automation and artificial intelligence tools are increasingly handling routine customer queries.
In 2024, AT&T in Slovakia reported a modest year-on-year increase in profit to €6.2 million, while revenues rose to €169 million.
According to workers in Košice, jobs in Bratislava might also be at risk in the near future.

The cuts come against the backdrop of mounting pressure across Slovakia’s shared services sector, which has expanded rapidly over the past decade but has faced growing challenges since the coronavirus pandemic.
AT&T also reduced its workforce in Slovakia in January 2021, when around 10 percent of its then 2,800 jobs were cut. Further cuts followed in subsequent years.
SkryťTurn off adsLast year, Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia also carried out layoffs in Košice, with 150 employees laid off over the summer.


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