Another big tech employer is making drastic cutbacks to its workforce, with Sprint Nextel now joining Microsoft amongst the companies looking to improve their bottom lines. Sprint's actions affect thousands more employees than Microsoft's dismissal of 5,000 workers, announced last week, with the telecommunications company removing 8,000 jobs.

Around 850 of the positions are those of people who are voluntarily stepping down, as part of a program Sprint began last year. The balance will be fired between now and April. These reductions should allow the company to save up to $1.2 billion each year.

Our first concern is that Sprint will cut down on available phone support operators or source the positions out overseas. The company addressed these concerns, identifying phone support as a vital department, and said it will try to cut jobs from other departments that don't directly deal with customers before it makes any moves than might negatively affect customer service.

We hope that's true, but 8,000 jobs is a huge number, around eight percent of Sprint's total workforce. It'd be difficult for a company to absorb that kind of personnel loss and keep it from changing the company's ability to provide its services. At the least, the remaining employees are likely to suffer morale losses, now knowing how desperate the company is to maintain its bottom line. Maybe a big staff change really is needed for Sprint to get its head back in the game - it seems hard to believe that a company can't make money on cell phones, considering how expensive the rates are. Sprint will publish its fourth quarter earnings next month, hopefully giving us a closer peek into what's going on.

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