A Florida-based attorney who advocates on behalf of American workers says the Tennessee-based insurance company Unum, which has about 3,000 workers in Maine, plans to outsource hundreds of jobs. Unum is neither confirming nor denying the claim.
Florida attorney Sara Blackwell represents clients in the U.S. who have lost their jobs to foreign workers. She also runs the nonprofit organization Protect US Workers. Between those two roles, she says, she has developed a fair number of inside sources, and one Unum insider recently told her that the company is planning to outsource jobs to India.
“My source says that they believe it’s between 300 and 500 jobs that are going to be lost,” Blackwell says.
Unum employs about 8,500 people across the U.S., including nearly 3,000 in Maine. Blackwell says those are some of the jobs at stake.
“Maine is definitely one of the locations. Anywhere there’s technology or finance workers is going to be affected,” she says.
“We are in the process of considering new business relationships,” says Unum spokeswoman MC Guenther, adding that this is nothing new. For at least 15 years, she says, Unum has pursued external partnerships to stay nimble.
“We look for some tasks that can be handled externally that can then free up our people to focus on the things that really require a level of expertise that only our employees can provide,” she says.
But currently, Guenther says, Unum has no specific plans, so the number of jobs Blackwell claims are on the line — 300-500 — is speculation.
“I would say that our Maine operation is the largest of Unum’s U.S. offices, and staffing levels there have remained steady in recent years, and we don’t expect this to change significantly,” Guenther says.
Earlier this spring, Gov. Paul LePage told a town hall audience in Orono that a company in southern Maine would shed about 900 jobs this summer. The company was never identified, and LePage’s spokeswoman did not respond to a question about whether Unum was the company he was referring to.
Meanwhile, Blackwell says Unum is in the process of negotiating a contract with an Indian company, which will likely be finalized in August.
“The contract is made in a way that’s it’s very hard for the company to get out of it — it’s very expensive for the company to get out of it. So our goal is to stop the company from signing the contract,” she says.
Guenther says some of the company’s current explorations into new business partnerships could yield results by August.
“I think we’re at least two months away from having any specifics about those conversations, so I guess it would be about that time frame,” she says.
But Guenther says Maine workers shouldn’t be concerned. She says employees know that existing external partnerships keep the company strong, and company departments expand and contract from time to time. She says there are many opportunities within the walls of Unum.
