Redundant PwC staff ‘shocked’ and ‘blindsided’

afr.com:

The email from PwC Australia’s leadership team inviting staff to a “firmwide webcast” arrived just before 9am. By the time it was finished a few hours later, so were more than 300 jobs at the once market-leading big four firm, along with the flagship tech hub it opened barely two years ago.

PwC Australia chief executive Kevin Burrowes says the cuts were a ‘difficult decision’, 

Chief executive Kevin Burrowes, along with the firm’s outgoing head of people and culture, Catherine Walsh, and the managing partner of the firm’s Adelaide skilled service hub, Gabriel Harris, had flown into the city, so they could speak to the affected staff in person after the webcast.

One now-redundant PwC junior staff member said he “tuned in for five minutes” to the webcast and watched as his internal PwC Microsoft Teams chats and private WhatsApp groups chats with colleagues “went off” with negative reactions to the news.

“One of my buddies is at the skilled service hub, and it’s grim there,” he said.

This staff member, like others who spoke to The Australian Financial Review, did not want to be named to avoid hampering his search for a new job.

Even staff members who thought they had escaped the fallout from the tax leaks scandal were not safe from the firm’s sweeping job cuts. The junior staff member said he was promised a job at PwC spin-off firm Scyne Advisory but was unexpectedly sent back to PwC last month, only to be let go altogether on Wednesday.

PwC sold its public sector consulting arm to private equity group Allegro Funds for $1 in July after the federal Finance Department effectively cut the big four firm off from winning new work when the extent of the tax leaks scandal became public in May.

“Half of my team stayed with PwC and