"Sprint Corp. will lay off roughly 140 workers — more than 40 percent of its local work force — when it closes its Solutions Center in Charlottesville in July, officials announced Tuesday. It was the latest in a series of major corporate layoffs to shake the region.

The job cuts come as the telecommunications giant seeks to consolidate services and cut costs amid weak market conditions. Nationwide, the company is laying off 575 people, with Charlottesville suffering the single largest number of job losses.

“We had kind of bucked the trend in telecommunications for a long time,” said Tom Matthews, a Sprint spokesman. “It just reached a point when telecommunications as a whole went through a couple of years of recessionary situation. [It] led to our having to pull back a little bit as well.”

Locally, employees were told of the layoffs at 4 p.m. Tuesday. The affected workers handle customer service calls, which will be routed to other call centers once the local center, on Hydraulic Road, closes.

One local Sprint employee among those laid off said the announcement left her feeling “kind of just numb.”

“People were very upset. More shocked, I guess is the word,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It will be hard. … I guess they just had to make a business decision, and this was a business decision.”

Another Sprint employee will mark her 31st anniversary with the company one week before she loses her job.

“There weren’t a lot of people happy, you know,” she said. “But God provides.”

Employees who are terminated will be eligible for severance pay and benefits packages based on their length of service and other factors. They also will be allowed to apply for other posts within the company, Matthews said.

After the cuts, the company will employ about 200 people locally, including repairmen, supervisors and marketing and external affairs workers.

Matthews said he could not quantify how much the company expects to save by trimming the 142 positions. “It’s a long-term operational savings,” he said. “I think any dollar amount like that would be in a state of flux and probably considered proprietary.”

The layoffs are the latest in a series of cost-cutting measures as Sprint continues its efforts to reorganize and streamline operations. The company will now employ roughly 70,000 people, down from about 80,000 in 2001 — but still far more, Matthews noted, than the 45,000 it employed in 1995.

Matthews said he knew of no plans for further cuts. “At this point, we’re really not looking at any more,” he said. But, he added, “the company is always looking at operational efficiency.”

Timothy Hulbert, president of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce, called the job cuts “unfortunate” and said the loss will have repercussions on the local economy.

“Companies in that [telecommunications] industry have been hammered in the last four or five years,” he said. “I imagine Sprint is reacting to the market. Hopefully, when conditions change they’ll have an opportunity to grow back.”

As for the local impact, he said: “It’s another loss of jobs and that’s never good. That’s 140 people, 140 jobs that are gone. That affects secondary and tertiary economies. I really can’t quantify it better than that.”

The Sprint layoffs come less than seven months after Technicolor Home Entertainment Services announced it was letting go 750 workers and closing its facilities in Albemarle and Greene counties. Prior to that, in late 2001, Wrangler closed its production plant in Madison County, costing more than 200 people their jobs.

Sprint announced last month that its net income in the first quarter rose to $1.67 billion from $140 million in the period a year earlier. The sale of its directory business added $1.3 billion in earnings.

First-quarter total sales, however, fell to $6.34 billion from $6.64 billion, down 4.5 percent.

Company stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange closed at $6 per share, up from a Tuesday low of $5.98 but down from its opening price of $6.08." (Josh Barney and Elizabeth Nelson, The Daily Progress, May 7, 2003)

Contact Josh Barney at (434) 978-7264 or jbarney@dailyprogress.com. Contact Elizabeth Nelson at (434) 978-7245 or enelson@dailyprogress.com.