Telstra Corporation Ltd (ASX: TLS) must think twice prior to its alleged plan of laying off thousand of workers as federal senators urged the company to consider first its corporate and social responsibility of providing stable employment in Australia.

Labor Senator Doug Cameron said on Thursday that Telstra should also prioritise its responsibility to its employees along with its goal of increasing its profit figures as he reacted to a report by The Australian Financial Review that the company is mulling the reduction of up to 6000 jobs to achieve 15 percent gains in earnings for the next three years.

Senator Cameron said that downsizing should the least of Telstra's priorities at a time when the economy is still in the midst of recovery as he noted that the Labor government itself had managed to preserve jobs during the height of the economic downturn mainly due to its adroit economic management.

On the part of the giant corporations such as Telstra, the Labor senator said that "there should be reciprocal obligations from companies in this country to try to keep workers in as long as possible."

Also, Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said that the planned job cuts by Telstra could eventually hamper its ability to be an affective partner in the nationwide roll out of the national broadband network (NBN) as he stressed that "with the loss of more staff it will also lose the capacity to deliver services."

Senator Joyce pointed out that the NBN implementation would require at least 25,000 technical workers to take on the mammoth task of delivering broadband connections even to the fringe parts of Australia as fellow Nationals Senator John Williams agreed that "you cannot provide services without manpower."

In a released statement, Telstra confirmed that the company would be reducing its staff numbers but it refused to divulge the exact figures of the planned cuts, stressing only that the management initiative would be undertaken to slash corporate bureaucracy and check Telstra's dipping revenues due to market share woes and growing disinterest on business fixed-line connections.