The union says it is ready to help Nokia engineers should they get laid off.
The union's head Pertti Porokari told YLE that, even though the shift from Nokia’s own Symbian to Windows operating system is next year’s project, layoffs will likely come at the start of the transition period.
“Some of the current engineers will remain to maintain the Symbian system, but it’ll be a smaller group,” Porokari estimates.
In Finland, about 4,000 engineers are working on developing the Symbian platform. The redundancy talks however also threaten MeeGo developers, who number under a thousand. The union hopes for as many engineers as possible to remain working at Nokia with the Windows system.
“When the information came about a shift to Windows, we here at the union started preparing immediately. We’ve launched a new section for Nokia employees on our web page and we’ve also visited the factories to hold talks. We are making sure that all the laws are being upheld during the layoffs process,” says Porokari.
Nokia announced its partnership with Microsoft in February, but the company did not say then how many people would face layoffs as the result. Nokia is arranging large-scale meetings all over Finland at 11 am on Wednesday to announce the start of redundancy talks.
