Northeast Utilities has laid off 173 employees since its April merger with Boston-based NStar, and 70 percent of those job reductions have come in Connecticut.
All the merger-related layoffs are corporate employees and have not impacted utility operations such as Connecticut Light & Power and Yankee Gas.
Before the merger creating New England’s largest utility was finalized on April 10, NU and NStar said they hoped to achieve $780 million in savings by bringing the two companies together. The savings including eliminating redundancies between the two firms, including laying off people with similar corporate roles.
When Connecticut regulators signed off on the merger, the utilities agreed to provide information to the Attorney General and Consumer Counsel about those layoffs. When the merged NU failed to provide this information, Attorney General George Jepsen filed a complaint late last year against the utility demanding the information, specifically how the layoffs were split between Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The two sides reached an agreement on Tuesday, where NU will provide quarterly reports about its layoffs.
In its first quarterly report to Connecticut, NU said 398 employees have left the company since the merger, and that 173 of those were layoffs due directly to the merger.
Of that 173, NU spokeswoman Caroline Pretyman said 70 percent were in Connecticut while 30 percent were out of state.
Before the merger, NU and NStar had 9,075 employees between the two companies. As of the end of the third quarter, the company had 8,920, including 164 new hires.
NU was involved in a similar dispute with regulators in Massachusetts over its employment levels, a matter which also has been resolved.
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