At an appearance before the federal industry committee Monday afternoon, after being grilled on pricing practices, Rogers Communications Inc.’s RCI-B-T chief executive officer was asked how many employees were no longer working for the company as a result of its 2023 acquisition of Shaw Communications Inc.
Tony Staffieri declined to provide an exact figure to members of Parliament, saying that since the merger, the company had created 1,800 jobs in Western Canada. That was part of Rogers’s commitments to Ottawa in exchange for its approval of the deal.
However, company figures suggest that more than 3,000 Rogers or former Shaw employees had their jobs cut or left the company in the year the merger took place.
That’s based on the number of Shaw employees reported on its company website, the number transferred to Quebecor Inc. QBR-B-T as part of Shaw’s sale of Freedom Mobile, and the number of active employees disclosed by Rogers in annual reports before and after the merger took place.
A Rogers spokesperson did not comment on the specific number of jobs lost as part of the merger.
“Overall, we reduced our work force by a small percentage, including through a voluntary departure program,” said Rogers spokesperson Zac Carreiro in an e-mail. He noted that “in any given year, some employees decide to leave the company for other opportunities, and some retire. We also hire staff, and that’s been no exception since coming together with Shaw.
“We remain committed to creating thousands of jobs over the next few years as we accelerate our growth and invest in our networks and communities,” he added.
It’s not unusual for merging companies in the same sector to cut some jobs, as they look to reduce expenses by finding efficiencies between duplicated roles. Last year, The Globe and Mail reported that roughly 1,200 Rogers employees had left the company as part of a voluntary staff-departure program. But Rogers has never disclosed the total number of employees affected by the merger.
Rogers and Shaw first announced their intention to merge in March of 2021. That December, the “About Shaw” page of Shaw’s corporate website was updated to note that the company had 9,000 employees, according to a record of the website. This number remained on the company’s website until after the acquisition’s close in 2023. The number was still there after the page was rebranded with the Rogers logo, until the page was taken down in July and the URL redirected to Rogers’s website.
Rogers lists its total number of active employees at the end of each year in its annual report. Before the merger closed, as of Dec. 31, 2022, Rogers listed 22,000 employees. The following year, after the merger had closed on April 3, 2023, the company said it had 26,000 employees.
In order to ensure competition in the industry, the federal government required Shaw to divest itself of its Freedom Mobile business, considered Canada’s fourth largest wireless provider. Quebecor acquired the company, closing the deal on the same day in April, 2023. Quebecor listed in that year’s annual information form that, as of Dec. 31, 2023, it had 1,602 employees working under its Freedom Mobile brand.
The number of Rogers and Shaw employees combined, offset by the Freedom employees that went to Quebecor, suggests a total of about 3,400 net jobs lost.
In order to secure federal approval, Rogers also signed a number of commitments spanning network investment, pricing commitments, programs for low-income Canadians and job creation. On the latter point, the company agreed to create 3,000 jobs in Western Canada within five years, and maintain them for 10 years.
In its first of 10 mandatory annual disclosures, which it made in April, Rogers said it had created 812 jobs in Western Canada in 12 months following the deal’s close, including the repatriation of approximately 300 Shaw customer-service jobs back to Canada. It said it also hired 1,100 technology contractors as well as other skilled contractors, to support its merger commitments. The company was not required to disclose net job changes resulting from the deal.
In its report, Rogers said it had either already completed its other commitments to the government, or had made progress toward them. The company reported that it spent $400-million of its committed $2.5-billion on 5G networks in Western Canada, and $1-billion of the committed $3-billion on additional network, services and technology investments, including in the expansion of its cable network.
The company said it was upholding its commitments to maintain a headquarters in Calgary and maintain existing Shaw Mobile wireless plans for five years after the closing date.
With a report from Alexandra Posadzki