Virgin Media O2 cuts jobs: AI in the service of creditors

According to the Guardian, Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), owned equally by Liberty Global and Telefónica, is set to cut thousands of jobs under an £800 million savings plan. Up to 25% of its 16,000 employees could leave. Of that total, £300 million would come from job cuts, which would shrink the wage bill by 30% within two years. The company says it wants to rely more on AI, particularly in customer service, and to tackle £22 billion of debt.

What the dispatch does not say: how many posts exactly, in which departments, with what guarantees, and whether unions have reacted. We will not invent it. What follows is our reading.

Let us first look at the mechanics. It was not AI that ran up £22 billion of debt; it was financing choices. Yet it is the customer service staff who will foot the bill. The shareholders' debt is settled in other people's working hours. We have seen more original schemes, but rarely one so transparent.

The script is well rehearsed: the technology arrives, modernity is beyond debate, and the jobs vanish as if by magic. But a machine is never neutral. In capitalist hands, it serves to produce more cheaply and to tighten discipline over those who remain, not first and foremost to free people from toil. AI was supposed to reduce working time; in practice, what gets reduced is mostly the number of workers, and the load on those who stay goes up. The real question is who owns these tools and who profits from their gains. Here, the answer fits in a press release: Liberty Global, Telefónica and their creditors.

We also see, in full light, the relationship of surplus value. Workers produce more than they cost; that gap feeds profit, and when automation allows that gap to be produced with fewer people, the wage bill becomes a variable to be adjusted. A 30% cut in that bill, presented as a "savings target", turns the lives of thousands of households into a line in a ledger. Nobody is cruel in this, and that is precisely the problem: the logic is structural, and it does not even need malice.

And the work saved by AI, who does it? The customers who ring a helpline, often over a billing or connection problem, do not disappear. Their waiting time, meanwhile, becomes free: one more unpaid task, passed on to the user.

The Republic loves to remind us that work is a value. It is less forthcoming when it comes to saying who reaps its fruits. If AI saves time, the question is simple: to whom is that time given back? To employees, in the form of reduced working hours and maintained pay, or to shareholders, in the form of dividends and deleveraging? We await the management's answer with curiosity. We fear we already know it.