Adding to the list of corporate giants that have slashed jobs since pocketing massive windfalls from the GOP tax cuts, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) released a report on Monday detailing how the telecom behemoth AT&T cut over 10,000 jobs and announced the closure of three call centers in 2018 despite receiving a $20 billion boost from the deeply unpopular tax law.
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“AT&T continues to eliminate thousands of good, family-supporting jobs from coast to coast, and has cut more than 16,000 call center jobs in the past seven years alone.”
—Communications Workers of America
“AT&T is breaking its promise to workers, customers, and communities across the country,” Linda Hinton, vice president of CWA District 4, said in a statement. “The company pledged to invest in U.S. workers if the tax bill passed, but they’ve done just the opposite.”
According to the union’s report (pdf), AT&T slashed at least “10,700 union jobs across its business” in 2018—cuts that directly undermine CEO Randall Stephenson’s lofty promise to invest the billions in gains from the GOP tax cuts in creating jobs and bolstering his company’s workforce.
“AT&T continues to eliminate thousands of good, family-supporting jobs from coast to coast, and has cut more than 16,000 call center jobs in the past seven years alone,” the report notes. “Instead of investing in its workforce and transitioning to jobs of the future, AT&T is laying off American workers and relying increasingly on a global web of low-wage contractors to provide customer service and network maintenance.”
Betsy Lafontaine, a CWA member and long-time employee at AT&T’s Appleton, Wisconsin call center—which is slashing jobs in March—said in a statement that the company has “shifted our customer calls to offshore vendor centers where workers are paid less than $5 an hour, and at the same time have made our sales metrics tougher and more exacting to meet.”
“Now we have a tough choice—uproot our lives and transfer to another center that AT&T may shut down in a few years, or try to find one of the few jobs here with good benefits and family-supporting wages,” Lafontaine added.
On top of documenting the company’s deep job cuts, the CWA report also hits AT&T for handing out meager bonuses relative to the enormous sums it has raked in from the Republican Party’s $1.5 trillion in tax cuts.
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