I've seen now in two posts mentioned that AT&T is planing to get rid of a third of its workforce by 2020. When was this announced?
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The company, now that it has time warner, will start exiting some of it's legacy businesses. Either by outright sale or spin off, or most likely, let it whither and die. Anything wireline related, whether consumer or business is a goner. Wireless will continue to under go relentless cost cutting because margins AND revenue are shrinking. No choice.
AT&T in the last 18-24 months has outsourced jobs to Mexico, Philippines, India and many other foreign countries, which has increase dramatically the fraud on customer's accounts. Then the employees that have to try to repair these fraud accounts either do not care, or are not qualified to straighten out the total mess causing customers to either get suspended or canceled. You would think that AT&T would see that they need to keep these jobs here in America where the employees are paid a decent wage and have the union on their side. It seems to me that at this day and time AT&T is only interested in the mighty dollar however, if AT&T keeps this pace up they will lose more customers thereby causing the failure of AT&T. AT&T used to be one of the most trusted companies in the world, but those days are long gone.
PLE is ineffective because organizations are scored on a percentage complete, not raw hours. Any non-tecnical jobs had a quarter of the training hours that technical jobs had, just for introductory courses.
"A few of us finished the program in PLE within the first year." - PLE is worthless, anything you learned is cursory and introductory at best.
Well, they have already started cuts in August and I have heard that there will be another early next year. AT&T is no longer a safe place to work...they are outsourcing as fast as they can and have no concern for employees. My advise is to look elsewhere...fast!
There is a lot of talk about headcount reduction thru surplus, but they are reducing numbers in other ways also. They are trying to make people quit and it is working. My garage in Michigan there is at least 5 people about to leave with another 10 to 15 actively interviewing for new jobs. This job used to be nice but ever since the re org it’s crumbling. And the customer is being hurt by the actions of the company also
Executives = suits = mo--ns .
My group has been on the cutting edge of cloud computing for around 6 years. When the skills pivot came out, we were already there. A few of us finished the program in PLE within the first year. Our group was put on notice that we were eligible for surplus on Monday.
Good luck on selling off the copper lines in California.
I'm thinking AT&T will soon spin off or shut down a big chunk of its business division. It's not creating any new products, and instead is mainly reselling solutions from Cisco, Symantec and other partners. That can't be bringing in a lot of money. Plus, AT&T's efforts at "innovating" in areas like IoT are a joke. I wouldn't be surprised to see it shift budget to the entertainment area and jettison the business division.
At the time they announced it, they had over 300,000 employees. Immediately before acquiring Time Warner, they had 250,000 or so.
I think meeting the headcount reductions by 2020 depends on them successfully exiting landline telephone.
While layoffs are always an option, normal turnover can reduce numbers if there is no back fill. It would be interesting to see what the normal quitting/retiring numbers are year to year actually.
2 years ago. In several articles it was mentioned. Nearly 30,000 let go since then so not entirely out of the realm of possibility.
I'm sure it's mostly speculation, but there was a New York Times article written in 2016 titled 'Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells It's Workers: Adapt or Else'
Here is the quote from that article that many are probably basing the 1/3 reduction number off of:
"If you don’t develop the new skills, you won’t be fired — at least AT&T won’t say as much — but you won’t have much of a future. The company isn’t too worried about people leaving, since executives estimate that eventually AT&T could get by with one-third fewer workers.
Mr. Stephenson declined to project how many workers he might have by 2020, when the cloud-based system is supposed to be fully in place. One thing about cutting people in an aging work force, he noted, is that “demography is on our side.” Other senior executives say shrinking the work force by 30 percent is not out of the question."