During a meeting held between Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, Minister Austin Gatt, Sonny Portelli, chairman GO plc, and Deepak Padmanabhan, CEO of Emirates International Telecommunications and Director of GO, it was confirmed that GO has so far never considered declaring any of its employees redundant either prior or after 2009.

Furthermore, and with immediate effect, the company has terminated the measure it had adopted earlier this year, whereby surplus employees, in some units of the company were temporarily placed in a pool, pending re-deployment. All these employees will be now be re-assigned fixed postings within the company

Mr Portelli and Mr Padmanabahn explained to the Prime Minister and Minister Gatt that the company has been focusing its attention on re-engineering its organisational structures, and on improving the operating efficiencies of the GO Group.

This was due to the fact that the Telecoms environment has become one of the most challenging businesses requiring constant deployment of high levels of capital expenditure to keep in step with new technologies, and a highly skilled and motivated workforce able to cope with the constant change in technologies.

The company, therefore, has to be continuously performance driven, constantly seeking its best performers and encouraging them (through rewards) to achieve more, while at the same time monitoring all the others, and assist them to improve their efforts through re-training and re-skilling. In this industry lifetime learning and re-training has become a fact of life.

So long as people accept these realities and continue to show willingness to strive to improve themselves and contribute to the success of the company, the company will ensure they will get all the assistance, and resources necessary, and the word redundancy will never be heard in the GO Group.