Australian employees at transport giant Toll are expected to bear the brunt of a large job-cutting drive, starting with up to 200 layoffs to be announced this week.
Managers from Toll Group will hold meetings with union officials in coming days to discuss job losses.
Toll's managing director, Michael Byrne, said the company had started informing workers of initial plans for 180-200 redundancies, following a review into competitiveness and efficiency.
"This is not a move we take lightly," he said. "We will fully support employees impacted by these changes, including offering redundancy entitlements, redeployment opportunities where available, and career transition support.
The layoffs will mainly affect workers in office, managerial and support roles in Australia, where the company said it was facing "challenging" market conditions.
Toll's longer-term redundancy target is not yet known, but there are fears hundreds more retrenchments could be imminent from the company's operations worldwide. The bulk of Toll Group's 40,000 employees are based in the Asia Pacific region.
The Melbourne-based logistics giant was taken over by Japan Post in a $6.5 billion takeover deal in 2015.
Union leaders representing the company's administrative and clerical staff said Toll had not responded to multiple requests for further details on redundancies.
"It's very unsettling for our members not to know who, when and where any job losses might occur," Australian Services Union secretary Ingrid Stitt said.
"We will keep pursuing them for some more details."
The Transport Workers Union on Monday said it was organising a series of meetings to discuss the job cuts.
"The TWU will be meeting union delegates and the company in the coming days to consider, in consultation with the workforce, the redundancies, including job transfers and redundancy proposals," a union spokeswoman said.
It's very unsettling for our members not to know who, when and where any job losses might occur.
Ingrid Stitt
Toll management said the outcome of the productivity review would lift competitiveness and efficiency.
"As a global leader in logistics, we need to continually review our operations to adapt to changing market conditions," Mr Byrne said.
"Our aim is to not only drive improvements in the short term, but also continue to build our global supply chain strategy to offer our customers a competitive advantage."
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