Layoffs Coming for Thousands of AT&T Employees
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AT&T says it will undergo a year of growth and investment following a year of innovation and legislative wins, but layoffs are part of the plan.
The Indy Star writes that the company is also planning to lay off thousands of workers. The newspaper cites Communications Workers of America (CWA), one of the main unions associated with the company. The CWA says many of AT&T’s U-verse ad DirecTV technicians will lose their jobs.
AT&T and Comcast both celebrated the end of the year by announcing holiday bonuses. AT&T handed some 200,000 employees an extra $1,000, citing the recent tax-reform law. CEO Randall Stephenson said AT&T would invest an additional $1 billion in the U.S following the successfully signed legislation.
AT&T’s Randall Stephenson
“Congress, working closely with the President, took a monumental step to bring taxes paid by U.S. businesses in line with the rest of the industrialized world,” Stephenson said. “This tax reform will drive economic growth and create good-paying jobs. In fact, we will increase our U.S. investment and pay a special bonus to our U.S. employees.”
AT&T and other service providers say they also anticipate technological innovation as a result of net neutrality’s repeal. But layoffs are also in store for 2018.
AT&T says it will not disclose the locations or numbers associated with the cuts, but acknowledged that there will be some turnover. Spokesman Marty Richter told Channel Partners that the layoffs are coming as a result of increased hiring in other areas.
“We’re adding people in many parts of our business that are experiencing higher customer demand. 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’re adjusting our workforce in some of those areas,” the carrier said.
Richter says that many of the laid-off employees will receive another job within AT&T. Other employees have the opportunity to transfer to another location.
“We’ll work to find other AT&T jobs for as many affected employees as possible. Regarding premises technicians, we adjust the workforce based on changing market dynamics, which vary from region to region,” Richter said. “In some regions we are hiring these same resources and these employees have the opportunity to transfer to those locations. It’s important to note that we still have thousands more premises technicians than we did two years ago.”
AT&T and CWA signed a long-awaited contract for more than 20,000 employees last month.
I think you have to be careful to differentiate between a one-time bonus and a ‘raise’. Bonuses are nice but they are not a permanent change in compensation and they have different tax implication for the employee (they may be taxed at a higher rate) and for the company (look carefully to determine whether both companies used the bonuses to reduce their in-year tax exposure). It’s important to understand the context- did the companies effectively save money with these bonuses?
I am a former employee of AT&T and reside in the US and the one the AT&T does not want disclosed to the long term plan for them is to eliminate as many US employees as they can due to be able to secure contracted labor in India and Philippines. Our work group was transition to IBM back in May 2017 with the statement we would be on the AT&T contract with IBM for the next year, with our same pay and that we would received our normal annual bonus in FULL in March of 2018. Well, that time came and we only received half of our annual bonus from IBM and were informed that we would received the second half in March 2019 IF we were still employed with IBM. Then in May massive layoffs came from IBM stating ATT has told them to build up the IBM Team in Manila. Our director had a conference call with us to discuss the reason why the promise in May 2017 was not kept on our bonus, he stated that AT&T has told IBM that they can hire 4 people in Manila (Philippines) for every 1 person in the US. As a person who is living through believe AT&T and IBM only care about the numbers reported to wall street and not the US based employees who helped them grow into the companies they are today. if would really inspiring to see one of these big companies take a RISK on the US based employees and invest in them instead of the ever increasing salaries of senior management. Let’s not forget about the 7 million dollars Randall Stephenson lost on the T-Mobile deal then within months of that lost thousand of people lost their jobs in order to recover the lost revenue. It would be really nice to have the truth behind all the layoffs on the US based only AT&T employees.