Dreaded ‘O’ word – outsourcing – claims 135 jobs

Pitney Bowes will eliminate about 135 Fairfield County IT jobs along with another 30 in upstate New York and Maryland, outsourcing some of them to an Indian firm that could hire many of the laid off employees to continue their work under the new employer.
“At the end of the day, about half of the people affected by this will end up as employees of the outsource company,” said Matt Broder, vice president of external communications at Pitney Bowes”™ Stamford headquarters.
The bulk of the job loss will be in Danbury, where about 100 IT positions will be eliminated. About 24 positions will be lost in Shelton, a dozen in Stamford, 20 in Colonie, N.Y., and about 10 in Lanham, Md., he said. “Around 100 of the couple hundred positions will be filled by employees of the vendor,” Broder said. “The vast majority of the jobs will remain in Danbury.”
Broder said some of the job loss will be in unfilled positions, but that most of the loss will affect full-time and contract workers.
Pitney Bowes notified the state Department of Labor July 18 that 96 Danbury employees will be laid off Sept. 20. Federal law requires companies with more than 100 full-time employees to notify the state 60 days in advance of a closing or large layoff. The department could provide what it calls its Rapid Response Team to help employees who are not rehired by the outsource company with unemployment filings and job searches.
Broder said Pitney Bowes and the outsource company, Wipro Technologies of Bangalore, India, are “still in the due diligence phase.” The two companies hope to sign a contract in late September when some Pitney Bowes employees could be hired by Wipro, he said.
Wipro is a global IT services company with about 76,000 employees around the globe. “They do a lot of work with American, European and Japanese companies,” said a spokesman for Gutenberg Communications in New York City, which represents Wipro. A Wipro spokesman was not available for comment.
The Danbury layoffs will not affect Pitney Bowes”™ mailing machines design and production operations in the city and Newtown, Broder said. The large and complex machines cut, fold, insert and meter various mailings by financial, insurance and health-care companies. About 550 are employed in the Danbury operations, another 350 are employed in the Newtown final mail machine assembly and shipping department operations.
Pitney Bowes has about 4,000 employees in the state, including 1,200 in Shelton, 1,100 in Stamford and 150 in Bridgeport.