AT&T dumps one-fifth of its remaining workforce

Outside the Portland AT&T building, which occupies an entire downtown city block, members of Communications Workers of America (CWA) showed up Oct. 19 to protest.

At rush hour along West Burnside Street, they paced with picket signs, angered at the layoff of one-seventh of AT&T’s Portland-area union workforce.

That one-seventh is Fred Walters. His loss leaves a union workforce of six. Two years ago, there were 18; five years ago, 120.

In Portland as elsewhere, AT&T is shriveling.

The picketing, coinciding with others in cities nationwide, was called to protest the latest round of layoffs, announced Oct. 7. In a press statement, AT&T said it will have reduced its workforce by more than one-fifth by the end of this year. That includes 2,000 union jobs lost, CWA says.

After the 1984 breakup of the Bell System into eight “Baby Bells,” AT&T still had over 200,000 union workers nationwide. About 15,000 will remain.

CWA spokesperson Jeff Miller said AT&T has been mismanaged and misguided for years. “It doesn’t have a plan and it’s slowly shrinking and hollowing itself out. They keep selling off businesses, and spinning off businesses, and getting out of businesses.”

AT&T bought into broadband and wireless in the late ‘90s, only to turn around and sell the new broadband division to Comcast in 2002 and the wireless division to Cingular this year. In July, AT&T announced that it will no longer compete for new residential customers for local and long distance service. The withdrawal was a reaction to a regulatory change that allowed the Baby Bells to raise prices on the lines they lease to competitors like AT&T.

AT&T will continue to serve existing residential customers, but its focus will be on business customers — for local, long distance and broadband service.

The Portland AT&T unit installs “fiber backbones” for business clients, including, until recently, the State of Oregon. It was only this past July that the unit that used to be Teleport was “accreted” to the union’s national contract.

CWA’s current nationwide contract with AT&T contains a pledge by the company not to outsource union work. But CWA says AT&T has been outsourcing customer service work — to call centers in India. In September the company closed a Charleston, West Virginia, call center.

© Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.