Remember how AT&T stood on top of a mountain to tell everybody how they were investing their big tax breaks back into building better infrastructure, raising workers’ wages, and creating more jobs? Yeah, I remember too. It was such a glorious day for America. Sure most of us knew that AT&T’s track record for telling the truth was about as good as our current president’s track record for telling the truth—but who doesn’t love good-sounding news! U S A! Of course it turned out that the big bonuses AT&T was touting were the result of AT&T workers’ union negotiating those bumps in wages weeks before the Republican Party gave the richest in our country a welfare check.
In December, AT&T issued $1,000 bonuses to more than 200,000 employees after the tax reform bill's passage. The company also promised to increase investment in the U.S. and, the union charges, implied hiring increases.
However, the union says over the past seven years, AT&T has laid off 16,000 call center workers nationwide, while closing 44 call centers, according to a CWA report out today — an early copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY. Many of those jobs have been outsourced to call centers in countries including Canada, Colombia and El Salvador, the union says, and it continued that trend in December.
But the union charges that the jobs cuts that are occurring unfairly hurt long-time employees, in favor of outsourced and contracted labor. "The outsourcing has created a sense of insecurity for folks," said Linda Hinton, CWA's AT&T Midwest vice president.
"(AT&T CEO) Randall Stephenson has said on several occasions he was committed to raising wages and creating good-paying jobs," she said. "We are trying to hold his feet to the fire on this. This is what you said and this is what we expect."
The union’s members have authorized a strike if negotiations with the company, since the current contract ended on April 14, does not bear fruit.