AOL (NYSE: TWX) UK workers have decided not to embark on industrial action to protest upcoming job losses after agreeing terms of a redundancy offer. The portal is shedding 2,000 of its 10,000-strong worldwide workforce as it transitions from an access provider to a content publisher, with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) having feared 22 of 39 UK editorial posts would go amid outsourcing to India. Now the NUJ tells Press Gazette it has won voluntary – rather than compulsory – redundancies, with an improved scoring system for deciding on who faces the axe. About 17 staff are expected to take redundancy by year’s end. AOL is bound to this redundancy model until the end of 2008.
Though it’s known 1,200 of AOL’s cuts will be at home in the US, the company last month refused to give us any specifics on losses elsewhere beyond saying they “will be spread across the rest of the world and that includes Europe”.