The storied Republican tax cuts continue to do exactly what their detractors said they would do: make money for rich people while doing absolutely nothing to stimulate wealth in the rest of society. There is a long list of corporations that continue to downsize their employee payrolls after pretending that big tax breaks would mean big infrastructure investments and bigger jobs for Americans. Now, AT&T is looking into a new massive “cost-cutting initiative,” that will undoubtedly include downsizing their workforce even further.
As LightReading reports, at an investor forum in the beginning of December, AT&T CFO John Stephens explained that their cost-cutting would “include a 4% cut in the operator's labor expenses.” Those labor expenses make up around $1.5 billion and usually means “jobs.” Considering that some estimates put AT&T’s financial “savings” from the Republican tax cuts at around $42 billion, it is just remarkable that the obvious greed involved here isn’t bigger news.
As part of the self-serving propaganda push for the wildly unpopular tax breaks, CEOs like AT&T’s Randall Stephenson told the world that they would be investing more billions into infrastructure and great paying jobs. Those investments and those jobs have never materialized, meaning that they were just words, not actions, which in turn means that they were outright lies.
At the end of 2018, as the big Republican tax-welfare-breaks to corporations and the rich kicked in, telecoms like AT&T began to to cut back on their promised infrastructure investments. Not only did those companies not invest more in their infrastructure, they have begun to pull back the pace with which they continue to expand. Of course, none of this is surprising when you consider that the history of telecoms like AT&T include decades of examples where after demanding—and receiving—corporate tax welfare, they have not lived up to their promised end of the bargain.
AT&T has run into financial problems after its multi-media mergers into television have ended up being big albatrosses around their necks. But those executives, making those bad business decisions, aren’t the ones on the chopping block.
