ENA Company intends to lay off 800 employees

Employees of Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) Company have been staging a protest outside the company’s head office since morning. The majority of protesters are employees of the department that serves large users.

Armen Khachatrian, head of the power supply unit, told the correspondent of Aysor.am that the department has 41 employees and all of them are expected to lose their jobs. In response to the correspondent’s remark that they were offered jobs in other units, Khachatrian said: “First, the indicated subsidiaries are in provinces, and secondly, we are sure that these people will be made redundant in two months”. Besides, not all employees received offers: most of them were told they would be transferred to the reserve, the unit head said.

“The reason is not office automation - they just decided to distribute the staff among subsidiaries. We are employees of fourth subsidiary in Yerevan. We have qualified specialists and achieved the highest indices. Three years ago a new director general was appointed. He turned our subsidiary into a department and now it will be closed down. He has no right to dismiss people. The issue should have been discussed in Moscow, but the decision was taken at a meeting of the Board of Directors and he was absent. He declared today, “Let Putin complete his visit and I will solve the issue at the Board of Directors”. That is, all this is his whimsy, there is no problem here,” Armen Khachatrian said.

In his words, as power engineering specialists, they are concerned over work of the whole system. “In fact, the unit set up to supervise large consumers will not function anymore, which will result in the weakening of the whole system,” he said.
Khachatrian added that they also heard that more layoffs are planned. “We have heard that starting from January, the company intends to lay off about 10% of the staff. It employs 8,000 people, which means that 800 people will lose their jobs,” he noted, adding that they applied to the Armenian president and members of the Board of Directors of Inter RAO UES. “These are illegal actions. We don’t understand what is going on,” the unit head said in conclusion.

Let us remind you that employees of ENA Company informed Aysor.am last week that the management decided to dismiss the staff of a whole department – 41 employees without prior warning. In particular, a decision was made to stop the work of the large users’ service department.

At that time the company’s spokeswoman Natalia Sarjanian refuted the information about layoffs, saying that employees will be transferred to other units of ENA.