Ver.di has warned Europe’s largest fixed-line carrier that if it refuses to continue talks over the job cuts, the union will make use of all possible industrial actions and force the company to negotiate, said ver.di’s deputy chief Franz Tremel quoted in Forbes.

Tremel is also a member of Deutsche Telekom’s supervisory board, which earlier this week approved the job cuts, despite nationwide demonstrations by thousands of DT employees.

The restructuring, which will involve no compulsory job losses, will cost 3.3bn euros ($4bn) and is modest given that the workforce at Europe’s biggest carrier is 244,000. The biggest reductions will be at T-Com, which runs the fixed-line network, where 20,000 out of the 47,000 jobs are to go. A further 5,500 jobs are to go at T-Systems.

A further 7,000 employees will be moved on a permanent basis to private company Vivento, which operates a large call-center operation. The company also plans to cut 1,500 jobs in the group’s centralized functions.

Job cuts are a sensitive issue in Germany where unemployment is running at 11.6%, and the country has nearly 5 million unemployed.

Earlier this month, the carrier’s personnel chief Heinz Klinkhammer seemed to lay the blame with the German government. In an interview with a German newspaper, he said the state did not lose its responsibility for Deutsche Telekom’s civil servants. If we prove that we cannot employ these civil servants any more, then it’s legitimate that we ask the state for alternative employment, he said.

Deutsche Telekom, like France Telecom SA, has a legacy of civil servants among its workforce, which stem from the days before the carriers were privatized and all employees were considered civil servants. Out of DT’s 170,000 employees in Germany, civil servants make up one third of the total.

Meanwhile, the carrier was hit with further bad news after it emerged that its competitors have increased their share of the German broadband market and are likely to achieve a 40% market share by end-2005, according to German telecoms watchdog the Bundsnetzagentur. This would be double the share recorded the previous year.