AT&T Finds People To Take Jobs In U.S. After CEO Calls U.S. Workers “Defective”
You might remember this post from a while back that had this quote from AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson who was commenting on the fact that he couldn’t find skilled people to fill the 5000 jobs that he had previously outsourced and wanted to bring back to the good old U.S. of A.:
“If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down.”
Fast forward almost a year and according to this press release, AT&T has found more than 3000 US citizens to fill those open positions:
“We expect to complete this ambitious 5,000 job in-sourcing initiative by this summer, less than three years after the program was announced,” said Bill Blase, senior executive vice president of Human Resources. “These are good jobs with good wages and benefits, and we are delighted to have them back in-house and on shore.
Imagine that. I guess not all Americans are “defective” after all.
The bulk of the new support jobs are located in broadband support centers in North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Kentucky. I’m guessing that Americans will be overjoyed that the tech support for their broadband will be handled by non-defective Americans rather than someone in a call center in Bangalore. But before you applaud AT&T, consider this statement from the same press release:
“We applaud our union partners in the Communications Workers of America who worked with us to create competitive cost structures that allow us to meet the demands of this competitive market while still providing good domestic jobs.”
Translation: To get the jobs back to the U.S.A., the Communication Workers Of America took it like a whore likely agreed to some measures that allowed the cost structure of on shore call center employees to be closer or equal to ones that are offshore.
Oh well. At least the jobs are back in the U.S.A. That’s a good thing, right?
January 31, 2009 at 11:45 pm
You may be right. The last CWA contract had provisions that required at&t bring those jobs back to the US. So four years late is better than never but still a break in the contract. My money is on the lawsuits filed in Texas. I’d bet they are the real reason at&t is finally bringing those jobs back. And the Union is just happy to get several thousand paying members back even if their dues will be lower.
The saddest part is over the past several years there have been several districts of CWA that have sold the rest of us members out. They made deals with at&t to allow them to hire contractors and temp employees (that are little more than Union dues paying contractors). Those deals opened the door for Prem Techs (U-Verse temps) and contractors working call centers in the US.
Where I work CWA is looked at by most as a company run Union. Sad but true. It’s not just Corporate America running the Unions into the ground. They forgot who they work for and who pays their salary. Same as at&t. The only thing that gets their attention is lost revenue. Welcome to Capitalism.