Secure Da Bag
Veteran
'They're liquidating us': AT&T continues layoffs and outsourcing despite profits
In the first six months of 2018, AT&T reported nearly $10bn in profit as the company seeks to finalize an $85bn merger with Time Warner. AT&T has spent $16.45bn on stock buybacks since 2013, including $419m in the second quarter of 2018, the most its spent on buybacks since 2014.
“Offshoring call center jobs often saves money in the short term,” said Virginia Doellgast, Chair of International & Comparative Labor at Cornell University. “It is more difficult to calculate the longer-term costs of offshoring, but they can be significant.”
On the shoulders of all its employees, we've made the company extremely profitable
Betsy LaFontaine, who has worked at an AT&T call center in Appleton, Wisconsin, for 30 years as a service representative said that over the past decade, her call center was downsized from 500 employees to fewer than 30 today.
“They’re liquidating us,” said “This is not a poor company. On the shoulders of all its employees, we’ve made the company extremely profitable.”
In a December 2017 news release advocating in favor of Trump’s tax cuts, AT&T promised bonuses of $1,000 to 200,000 employees over the next year. The news release omitted that unions had already previously negotiated those bonuses with AT&T before the tax cut bill was passed.
....
AT&T also claimed it would invest $1bn into the United States, noting that on average a $1bn investment in the telecom industry creates 7,000 jobs. AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, reportedly promised to create those 7,000 “hard hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year” with the $1bn investment in anticipation of the tax cuts.
Instead, AT&T has laid off an estimated 7,000 workers since that announcement was issued, according to the Communication Workers of America union. AT&T disputed this number, arguing they have hired 8,000 employees in the United States so far this year and 87,000 over the past three years.
To be fair to AT&T these layoffs have been happening to since 2011. But according to Trump and what AT&T has said publically, these layoffs should have been suspended and the workers getting job security and an increase in pay. Clearly it hasn't. AT&T is preparing for a downsizing of significant proportions. It's not just an issue of the "industry changing". Something economically is coming... soon.