The employees are worried that their jobs will be lost in a copycat scenario to the situation at Dell, where 2,000 workers lost their jobs to a new plant in Poland, after Limerick- based employees were asked to get the plant up and running.
News t
hat engineers at a Shannon telephony firm are training Indian workers has put local staff on high alert.
Earlier this year, Finland headquartered Tecnomen, which employs 180 people in the Shannon Free Zone - the majority of whom are believed to live in Limerick - completed a takeover of Indian firm Lifetree to form a new company 'Tecnotree'.
As part of the deal, the company now owns a second 'prepaid development centre' in India, to add to the one it has in the Shannon Free Zone.
Management at the Shannon facility told workers they would be asked
to take part in a 'knowledge transfer', which involves groups of workers
travelling from here to the east to pass on their engineering skills - through both demonstrations, and flowcharts to show their roles.
Now, 180 jobs - the majority of which are filled by people from Limerick - could be put at risk in the first part of 2010, with management allegedly admitting that many of the firm's 40 contractors could be gone by Christmas.
Tecnotree is involved in software development. It has designed, developed and integrated software for the pre-pay mobile phone market, and provides support for more than 50 million people in Latin America - all from scratch in the Shannon Free Zone.
