Unum job cuts are 'speculation and hearsay,' the company says
A U.S. labor website and an anonymous employee in the Portland office of the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based disability insurance provider Unum, has told the Portland Press Herald that the company is looking at outsourcing hundreds of jobs, including over 200 from the Portland offices.
In an email Thursday to the Press Herald, MC Guenther, a spokeswoman for Unum, wrote that although the company is in talks with potential partners, it currently has no response about the potentially hundreds of jobs being affected.
In an email to Mainebiz on Friday, Guenther responded further to the outsourcing reports with the following statement:
"We are considering new business relationships, but we are not at the point where we have specific plans or details about this work.
The numbers floating around are based on speculation or hearsay and there isn’t anything to confirm or deny because of that.
Working with external partners is not new to Unum. We’ve been taking this approach for many years across a number of business areas, including a 15-year-plus history of working with external technology partners doing maintenance and development on the application side.
To grow our industry leadership position and compete effectively in our markets, we’re always looking to evolve by finding new and better ways to do business.
Presently, we are considering new partnerships both within the U.S. and beyond it. We’re a multi-national company with a strong international workforce and partnerships that reflect that diversity.
As part of this process, we are constantly evaluating the best ways to achieve the right balance of internal and external support. This assures we have both the right expertise in-house and the flexibility we need through partners to adjust quickly to changing business needs.
Our Maine operation is the largest of Unum’s U.S. offices and staffing levels there have remained steady. We don’t expect this to change significantly."
Neither Portland city officials or Maine’s Department of Labor have heard of the layoffs, which the anonymous employee told the Press Herald could happen this summer.
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