The mass exit of thousands of Telkom employees came as no surprise, trade union Solidarity said this week.

Nearly 2 400 employees had opted for Telkom’s voluntary severance packages (VSPs) and officially parted ways with the embattled company on Friday.

“Given the volatile climate within Telkom, we anticipated that a significant [number] of employees would prefer to leave the company,” said Solidarity head of communications Marius Croucamp.

However, Solidarity raised the alarm on the number of skilled workers leaving the company, questioning what the impact on Telkom would be.

As Telkom grappled to implement a restructuring process to ride out a tough environment, trade unions continued to block the potential job cuts that could impact their members.

Earlier this month, the Labour Court halted Telkom’s restructure process, forcing the partially State-owned group to abandon its Section 189 process in favour of “generous” VSPs for all nonunionised workers, which represented 40% to 45% of Telkom’s workforce members, and examining other methods of curtailing costs.

The packages were made available until July 27.

The now-retracted Section 189 issued in June to unions would have resulted in the retrenchment of around 4 400 employees and around 3 400 more employees being outsourced to other companies or participating in an enterprise development programme.