Staff Face Uncertainty At Tesco After Redundancy Announcement

Published on: 29 Jan, 2019
Updated on: 31 Jan, 2019

There was uncertainty in the Tesco in Ashenden Road, Guildford, as Tesco PLC announced job cuts of up to 9,000 nationwide.

Tesco’s announcement of staff cuts has left Guildford staff uncertain.

Tesco has announced “…that up to half of these colleagues could be redeployed to other customer-facing roles. We are working with our third-party providers to understand the impact on their staff in our colleague hot food service”.

The announcement was made on the Tesco website after press speculation that up to 15,000 jobs would be lost.

One member of staff at the Ashenden Road store said: “We know nothing more than was said in the press. We haven’t been consulted yet.”

A spokesperson at the store was unable to comment on whether there would be redundancies at the Guildford branch.

Jason Tarry, Tesco CEO, said: “We’re making changes to our UK stores and head office to simplify what we do and how we do it, so we’re better able to meet the needs of our customers.

“This will impact some of our colleagues and our commitment is to minimise this as much as possible and support our colleagues throughout.”

The plans are looking to simplify the counters in the large stores, in particular, the ‘deli’ counters. Tesco expected that around 90 stores would close their counters, with the remaining 700 trading with either a full or flexible counter offer for its customers. There was no plan to make significant changes to the bakery counters this year.