Few workers can have witnessed such radical shifts of fortune in recent years as those employed by the telecommunications sector.

Once lumbering state monopolies, telecoms companies battled their way through the rapid waves of privatisation and deregulation of the early 1990s to emerge as rising stars driving the new economy. Now, shunned by financial markets and laden with debts, the sector's woes are deepening: employees - and the unions that represent them - face fresh rounds of restructuring that will again transform their landscape.

The present pain of job cuts is nothing new. The 1980s saw the start of downsizing on a large scale as AT&T, the US's near-monopoly company, was broken up into seven regional Bell operating companies and, in Europe, the privatisation of British Telecommunications, then a state monopoly, set in motion a spate of similar sell-offs across Europe.

In many cases, companies reduced their workforces dramatically. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), employment in France Télécom fell from 157,000 in 1994 to 143,000 in January 1999, while the workforce at Deutsche Telekom dropped from 233,100 in 1993 to 172,000 in 1999.

In the UK, downsizing at BT started in earnest in 1991 and rapidly gained momentum thereafter. "We went down from 250,000 to 130,000 workers over a five-year period between 1991 and 1996 - that virtually halved the company," says John Steel, BT's group personnel director. "At one point, about 19,000 [employees] left on one day - that was quite a challenge for the administration department."

In the US, the overall workforce employed in the sector fell from 965,000 in 1983 to 872,000 in 1992, according to the ILO, while AT&T lost more than half its unionised employees between 1984 and 1992.

But it is not just falling numbers of employees that has shaken things up for telecoms workers. Rapidly changing technology has created a roller-coaster ride for anyone continually employed in the industry over the past decade.

Companies that once provided little more than standard voice telephony now sell a multitude of products and services including transmission of data, sound and images, mobile communications, internet access, cable television and satellite operations.

Gender profile

Technological change has also been the catalyst for a shift in the gender profile of the sector as the proportion of telephone operators and clerical workers - traditionally women - has shrunk and the number of jobs focusing on IT skills has led to rising numbers of male workers. "This is now shifting again because there have been more efforts to get a better gender make up of the workforce," says John Myers, an industry specialist at the ILO.

And telecoms employees - at one time mainly engineers and switch operators - now consist of everything from sales and marketing managers to lawyers, customer service teams and investor relations executives.

As a result, the range of skills required of a telecoms employee has broadened dramatically. Convergence with media and entertainment has combined with accelerating technological developments to exacerbate the problem, forcing workers constantly to renew their skills in order to keep up with their jobs and remain attractive as employees.

Despite such upheavals in the industry, however, channels of communication between management and unions have remained surprisingly open. And while the volume of job losses over the past decade has been large, much of the early downsizing took place without compulsory redundancies.

"In heavily unionised companies such as BT, we've had to work very hard at creating a partnership," says Mr Steel. "We share our strategic plans with the unions at a very early stage and we sometimes work together in jointly approaching the regulator - because the unions understand our business."

The unions have also made training a central part of the negotiation process. In the US, through a powerful partnership between unions and management - the Alliance for Employee Growth and Development - training requirements are jointly agreed upon in companies that include AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Tyco Electronics Power Systems.

But while the unions may have been able to wield influence within the big incumbents (largely the heavily unionised former state-owned monopolies), elsewhere it is a different story. Thousands of telecoms workers are now employed in new sub-sectors of the industry dominated by new companies in which there is no union representation.

"Convergence is having a big impact," says Greg Tarpinian, executive director of the New York-based Labor Research Association. "Content provision is now as important as the technology. Companies like AOL Time Warner now focus on delivery through the cable sector and those companies are mainly non-union."

In addition, deregulation and the lowering of barriers to entry in the industry has opened the floodgates to a wave of new companies, particularly in areas such as wireless and broadband.

Some of the newcomers have taken an enlightened approach to employment. The UK mobile phone operator One 2 One, for example, has acquired a reputation as a responsible employer, encouraging dialogue between staff and management and installing cybercafes in its call centres.

Nevertheless, union leaders are anxious to extend their membership into these new areas. "The challenge for unions is to move into wireless, broadband and call centres," says Larry Cohen, executive vice president of the Communication Workers of America, which has been making efforts to recruit members in the wireless industry. The CWA scored a victory last year, when 1,200 workers at Cingular Wireless in Illinois joined the organisation.

Mr Cohen sees subtle differences between the situation in the US and that of Europe. "It is probably easier [in the US] to shift organisationally, because unions' roots are in the private sector," he says. "But then the political culture in the US supports outright union busting by high-growth firms - whereas in Europe it does not support that kind of behaviour."

But while the strength of union representation in the sector varies from country to country, the growth of the industry has been more global than most, presenting an additional challenge for those representing the interests of telecoms workers.

Unions have not failed to grasp the implications of the erosion of borders in their industry. "We have formal alliances with unions in the UK, Germany, and Mexico," says Mr Cohen. "It provides for one union approach and we'll continue to expand that. If our job is to help our members have clout and not to be pawns in the hands of the employers, we have to act in a global manner."

Globalisation

A significant step towards addressing the issue of globalisation was taken last January, when the United Network International (Uni) was established to promote co-operation between affiliated unions, helping them to negotiate with increasingly multinational employers. "We are responding to that challenge of globalisation," says Luis Neves, head of the telecoms sector at Uni.

In June, for example, OTE, the Greek telecoms company, and Uni - through its Greek affiliate the OME-OTE - signed a global agreement to respect union rights in whatever country OTE does business. Uni has also entered a global agreement with Telefonica, the Spanish telecoms group.

Based in Geneva, with almost 1,000 affiliated unions in 140 countries, Uni represents more than 15m members from the telecoms, post, graphical and media and entertainment industries - a recognition of the fact that technology has led to increasing convergence of these industries.

A "passport" scheme - designed with IT professionals in mind - gives members of a Uni affiliate the right to request services from the union in the country in which they are working. The organisation has also launched a campaign to organise workers in mobile communications companies across Europe.

But while Uni has had some success in giving union efforts a more global focus, further labour relations tests lie ahead. Tens of thousands of job cuts are being announced across the industry, and more may follow. As companies try to reduce debts and raise share prices, spin-offs and divestitures are also likely to create further instability in the employment landscape.

So while unions can help to secure severance and retraining packages for their members, it is likely that the telecoms industry will become an increasingly volatile working environment in the coming years.