'They're liquidating us':
AT&T continues layoffs and outsourcing despite profits, by Michael Sainato,
8/28/18.
Justice department to appeal against AT&T's $81bn takeover of Time Warner. Read more.
Justice department to appeal against AT&T's $81bn takeover of Time Warner. Read more.
The communications giant is expecting a windfall of
$20bn in savings from Trump’s tax reforms, but has closed 44 call centers since
2011.
In the past seven
years, AT&T has closed 44 call centers, four of them just this year.
Cindy
Liddick had worked at the AT&T call center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for
12 years before it closed earlier this month.
The former customer support specialist is among the more than 16,000
people in the United States who have lost their jobs at the communications
giant since 2011, as it continues to shut down call centers to consolidate facilities within the US, or in favor
of offshore alternatives in countries such as India, the Philippines and
Mexico.
Though
AT&T is earning record profits, spending billions on stock buybacks
and is expecting an estimated windfall of $20bn in savings from Donald Trump’s
tax reforms, it has continued to lay off workers and outsource jobs.
“My
husband is very ill, I’m about to lose my health insurance and starting over in the job
market at my age is going to be tough,” Liddick said.
In the
last seven years, AT&T has closed 44 call centers, according to the Communications
Workers of America labor union. Four closures, including the facility in
Harrisburg took place this year.
While
some workers are able to relocate to other call centers in the US, many are
left jobless. For some, their jobs are sent offshore, where workers can
be paid less than $2 an hour.
“My
center closed in 2011. It was a shock to all of us. At the time we had an area
manager telling us we had plenty of work to sustain our office,” said Laleelah
Hunter, an AT&T call representative in Cleveland for 19 years.
Hunter
was offered an option to stay and find a job elsewhere in the company in
Cleveland, while most of her colleagues were laid off or given the option to
relocate to Detroit, a two-hour drive away.
Liddick
said only two employees out of nearly 100 workers accepted an offer from
AT&T to relocate to Kentucky. She was not one of them. “It’s hitting me
really hard financially,” she said. “I could lose my house.”
An
AT&T spokesperson said the lease on the Harrisburg center had expired, “and
to increase efficiency we’re consolidating some call center work currently done
in Harrisburg into our other US facilities.”
“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, AT&T call center
employee
Several
AT&T employees explained they were hired with the impression their
positions would provide the opportunity to begin a career with job security.
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 negotiatedthose
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. Job
security for current AT&T employees is a highly contentious issue between
AT&T and the CWA.
In
April 2018, the CWA voted to authorize a strike for the 14,000 workers in the Midwest
and national workers in AT&T’s Legacy Unit as the union’s negotiations for
contract renewals remain at a standstill. But a union spokesperson said no
timeline or strike date has been set.
Unions
also filed an unfair labor practice claim with the National
Labor Relations Board against AT&T in May 2018 for the company failing to
disclose its plans to use savings from the Trump tax cut plan to reinvest in
its workforce. That claim is still pending.
“We’re on edge, not really knowing what’s
going to happen to us in the next month or two,” said Hunter. “We don’t feel
confident in what AT&T tells us about what lies ahead in our future.”
In a
statement, AT&T said: “We’re proud to be one of the country’s largest union
employers. And we continue to invest in good middle-class
careers in areas where we’re seeing increasing customer demand for our products
and services. Since 2011 … we’ve chosen to hire nearly 188,000 people in the
US.
“At
the same time, technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies and there
are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and
we must sometimes adjust our workforce in some of those areas.
“Most
of our union-represented employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they
are offered another job with the company if their current job is eliminated,
and when that happens many wind up staying on our payroll.”
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.
Comments
AT&T is attempting
to become a Media Conglomerate with its bid for Time Warner and has been using
telemarketers to try to get customers to bundle cable TV and internet services
with their phone bills. But their bundle deals are no better and neither are
the cable TV channels or internet service they offer.
I get 5 to 10
telemarketing calls a day and they are a nuisance. I hang up immediately.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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