AT&T jobs fight reflects broad worker anger
Connecticut has done fairly well with call centers over the years, with dozens sprinkled around the state in telecom, energy, ticket sales and other industries. They tend to employ people who in past generations might have worked in one of the state’s long-lost factories.
But call centers, like factories, come and go; we saw StubHub shutter its East Coast hub a few years ago and now, in Meriden, AT&T is eliminating 110 jobs — 89 of them organized by the Communications Workers of America local 1298.
This cut hurts because these are among the highest skilled call-center employees the world has ever known. They’re not taking reservations or bill payments or dealing with the public at all; no, these are AT&T in-house troubleshooters, keeping the company’s backbone network up and running in 22 states.
That’s why we’ve seen a backlash, including a bill in the state Legislature that would force more notification and punish violators, and letters to the AT&T CEO from Gov. Ned Lamont and the state’s entire Congressional delegation.
None of that will stop the migration of these jobs to Atlanta and the Nashville area, which seems to be a done deal over the next few months.
About one-third of the targeted Connecticut group supports 911 emergency systems, rerouting calls where there’s obviously no room for error.
And these workers, all 89 of them, make at least $90,000 plus generous health, retirement and vacation benefits, union president Dave Wiedlich Jr. said unapologetically. Most have more than 20 years experience dating back to the old Southern New England Telecommunications days, many more than 30.
All of the unionized workers and some of the affected managers have been offered $20,000 to move. Weidlich says they’ll make about $15,000 a year less in their new jobs, a figure AT&T would not confirm. Some are moving, some aren’t.
“It’s corporate greed at its best,” Wiedlich said. “It’s another example of a corporation that got huge tax breaks not investing in middle-class jobs in Connecticut.”
Those huge tax breaks include, by the CWA union’s estimate, a $20 billion benefit from the Trump tax reform of 2017, plus whatever state incentives AT&T has collected around the country — none, apparently, for this call center.
The picture, of course, is not quite so simple; it never is. AT&T says it’s not acting to save money on labor, though that might be part of the result. Rather, it’s consolidating call centers and a lot of other technical jobs in two “centers of excellence” in Georgia and Tennessee (union-unfriendly states, by amazing coincidence).
“We’ve found that larger centers with more employees are more effective, which is one reason we’re consolidating this work,” AT&T New England spokeswoman Karen Twomey said in an email.
That doesn’t satisfy Connecticut public officials or Wiedlich, especially after CEO Randall Stephenson made $38.7 million in 2018, including the value of stock options he exercised — and that wasn’t a particularly grand year for him.
Twomey makes the point that AT&T added thousands of jobs around the country last year, including 150 in Connecticut, where it has about 1,200 people — many in wireless. (AT&T sold its Connecticut wireline business to Frontier Communications five years ago.)
Still, that sort of payday at the top, at a time when the company is closing call centers in some places, doesn’t sit well in a state that thinks it can compete for top jobs requiring the highest skills.
“Clearly AT&T has not invested in job growth across the whole country,” Wiedlich said. “There’s no reason (Connecticut) could not have been a center of excellence for AT&T.”
He adds that AT&T should have allowed these workers to go with Frontier in the 2014 merger if it was going to close the call center.
The legislature, seeing all this, reacted with a bill that would do three things: Require companies running call centers to give at least 100 days notice in advance of eliminating at least onethird of any call center, with a $10,000 per day fine for violators; ban state aid packages for call centers executing deep cutbacks for at least five years, with a claw-back of aid looking back five years; and require state government call-center work to be done in-state.
The bill passed through the heavily pro-labor Labor Committee but fell short in the Judiciary Committee two weeks ago in a 25-11 vote that saw many Democrats — including a cosponsor, Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford — vote against it. That $10,000 penalty seems to have scared some of them. A leading sponsor, Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, the labor co-chairwoman, was absent the day of the vote.
“People weren’t really fully informed about the importance of this bill,” Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, co-chairwoman of the labor committee, said Monday. “Hopefully we’ll have a chance to try to bring it back up again before this session ends.”
That’s unlikely given the lopsided vote in Judiciary — and given Connecticut’s need to send some signal, somehow, that we’re not anti-business. Regardless, the bill will not affect AT&T’s plans even if it passes because the company gave plenty of notice.
What we’re really seeing is anger by working people and their representatives as the nation’s strong economy, and our tax policy, lifts mainly the people at the top such as Stephenson.
Yes, workers’ pay is rising, but inconsistently. And yes, these AT&T workers are very well paid by almost any standard. That’s beside the larger point of the anger we’re still seeing, rightly. The anger will continue to lead to bills of questionable effect as long as the system stays skewed.