7 ms·

The main issue here is that AT&T employs a large workforce that is not relevant to the current (Fiber) and upcoming (5G Cellular/WISP) service technologies bein

The main issue here is that AT&T employs a large workforce that is not relevant to the current (Fiber) and upcoming (5G Cellular/WISP) service technologies being rolled out en masse. Which means as their legacy business units are retired or pulled back, they are letting go numerous employees while simultaneously hiring a slightly smaller number of more educated (up-to-date) workers to staff up their new business units. What we are seeing here is the decline of a historically booming industry (linemen) as the overhead required to maintain these networks becomes more specialized in nature and involves fewer people than before. Now, the ethical strategy to mitigate impacting their historically loyal workforce would be to re-train the copper linemen to work with the new technologies. The problem with this is that its' expensive. Insanely expensive. The training is made available to many of their current workers, in as many areas as possible (where the skills will be relevant) however at the end of the day an individual 'first-line' manager will not advocate for 64 year old Joe Schmoe with average performance stats to get this expensive training if 24 year old Billy Bob with a 'young man's' performance record is also asking to get trained.

bluedino 7y ago
Didn't they lay off all the landline people and dial-up internet people years ago? I remember the massive layoffs in our town in the early 2000's, the old AT&T HQ was vacant for years
Aloha 7y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head - and I suspect you'd find out that most of these 'job losses' are mostly attrition thru retirement, not actual layoffs
- dralley 7y ago
  No, they are actual layoffs. You could have learned this with 5 seconds of googling or RTFA.
sethhochberg 7y ago
This is an area that I'm really interested in watching as there is more discussion around tech unions - the industry moves so fast, an emphasis on retraining seems essential when you'd be setting one up. Legacy unions haven't had to deal with making retraining as important a part of their value proposition in the past, but "we'll keep you safe, compensated, and relevant as the industry changes" is a pretty compelling platform. The IATSE (union for technical/artisan roles related to film/tv/audio/events/etc) created a training trust for their members in 2011 and, from what I've heard, it seems to be working pretty well. https://www.iatsetrainingtrust.org/ https://www.iatsetrainingtrust.org/ I'd love to see other unions take notes when their industries start to modernize. They do all of the standard OSHA training, etc, but also keep Lynda.com subscriptions for their members, reimburse group craft training organized by local chapters, and have developed some specific certificate programs for retraining into A/V roles from less technical ones.
- petee 7y ago
  I am an IATSE member, and can testify that the training trust is great for our membership. Most classes are free, if not significantly reduced. One of the best things out of it though, is the free CPR/AED class, which many members have taken and has saved more than a few lives, that I know of personally. I also regularly take advantage of Lynda.com, and we also have specialized classification training depending on what kind of work you are doing, be it special effects, welding, or aerial work. Out west, some of these classes are requirements for employment; the east is catching up
  - petee 7y ago
    An important note that I forgot, that needs to be emphasized here is that IATSE is not like many other unions in the sense that we are not a hiring hall, and do not have seniority as a policy. Each worker is hired based on skill -- that said, if you're a horrible person, you're not likely to get work, unless your skill is really above and beyond. The end result is a group of awesome people who do outstanding work.
- dmix 7y ago
  This would be great for tech startups. Especially globally. They'll be able to out-compete the big unionized tech companies so much easier!
tsomctl 7y ago
What I've heard anecdotally is that the union contracts for the linemen are written in terms of copper wire. Since fiber optic is not copper, AT&T is doing everything they can to get rid of the union guys and their expensive paychecks.
Spooky23 7y ago
That’s a scenario they created. There’s no reason the man in the van can’t hang up a WISP device or whatever. I used to run a field tech services org — it’s not that expensive to train new tasks, the hardest thing is hiring reliable people. Your old school HP and IBM CEs would service everything for 95% of service calls. They are busting the CWA, period. The same thing happened with National Grid in upstate NY. They’ll use 5 subcontractors and 10 guys to do a job that was handled by a 2-3 man crew 20 years ago. The hilarious thing is that that union didn’t have the stupid separation of duty stuff the contractors do. I saw one instance where they had a subcontractor on site specifically to spray bee spray.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  In other words, union labor is so burdensome, it can't even compete with 5x the manpower?
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    More likely they are aging out the workforce.
- kelnos 7y ago
  Is there a rational reason why companies would prefer to hire 3-5x the workers to do the same job, just to avoid having to deal with a union? Or is it all just union-related FUD?
  - bluGill 7y ago
    If you don't have work you don't pay the contractor. You still pay employees. Depending on the work this can be good or bad. When you have employees you also get flexibility in scheduling them. A contractor is expected to have other jobs and sometimes cannot get to your critical need right now. A contractor can sometimes give you a better deal because of those other customers who are willing to pay extra for last minute service.
    - 7y ago
lern2code 7y ago
...to re-train the copper linemen to work with the new technologies. The problem with this is that its' expensive. Insanely expensive. So... What you're telling me is that, if we were to automate lots of jobs with AI and robotics, those that lose their jobs would mostly be stranded jobless, as it would be too expensive for them to retrain for emerging jobs, or really any job at all? That the idea of technology eliminating jobs, but also creating new opportunities is laughably unrealistic?
DaniloDias 7y ago
The real scandal is not even close to being covered: The 23k jobs that have been cut are predominantly aging boomers who were offered packages to retire. There is plenty of new hiring, almost exclusively targeting millennial dev-ops people as AT&T tries to mimic Silicon Valley. The union people will not be going anywhere. This is a muckraker of an article.
- walshemj 7y ago
  That depends when BT did that a lot of people took redundancy and jumped over to competitors - there is a joke that BT's reduandancy scheme built the UK's mobile network.
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
An additional factor is that fibre-optic generally requires less maintenance, so even given the same scale of network there'd be a smaller workforce required.
oh_sigh 7y ago
> 64 year old Joe Schmoe with average performance stats to get this expensive training if 24 year old Billy Bob with a 'young man's' performance record is also asking to get trained. Even if Joe Schmoe has much better performance, it may still make sense to train Billy Bob. If training is truly expensive, and takes 5 years to pay off, odds are Joe is going to be retired at that point and it will be a waste of money.

bluedino 7y ago

Didn't they lay off all the landline people and dial-up internet people years ago? I remember the massive layoffs in our town in the early 2000's, the old AT&T HQ was vacant for years

Aloha 7y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head - and I suspect you'd find out that most of these 'job losses' are mostly attrition thru retirement, not actual layoffs

dralley 7y ago
No, they are actual layoffs. You could have learned this with 5 seconds of googling or RTFA.

sethhochberg 7y ago

This is an area that I'm really interested in watching as there is more discussion around tech unions - the industry moves so fast, an emphasis on retraining seems essential when you'd be setting one up. Legacy unions haven't had to deal with making retraining as important a part of their value proposition in the past, but "we'll keep you safe, compensated, and relevant as the industry changes" is a pretty compelling platform. The IATSE (union for technical/artisan roles related to film/tv/audio/events/etc) created a training trust for their members in 2011 and, from what I've heard, it seems to be working pretty well. https://www.iatsetrainingtrust.org/ https://www.iatsetrainingtrust.org/ I'd love to see other unions take notes when their industries start to modernize. They do all of the standard OSHA training, etc, but also keep Lynda.com subscriptions for their members, reimburse group craft training organized by local chapters, and have developed some specific certificate programs for retraining into A/V roles from less technical ones.

petee 7y ago
I am an IATSE member, and can testify that the training trust is great for our membership. Most classes are free, if not significantly reduced. One of the best things out of it though, is the free CPR/AED class, which many members have taken and has saved more than a few lives, that I know of personally. I also regularly take advantage of Lynda.com, and we also have specialized classification training depending on what kind of work you are doing, be it special effects, welding, or aerial work. Out west, some of these classes are requirements for employment; the east is catching up
- petee 7y ago
  An important note that I forgot, that needs to be emphasized here is that IATSE is not like many other unions in the sense that we are not a hiring hall, and do not have seniority as a policy. Each worker is hired based on skill -- that said, if you're a horrible person, you're not likely to get work, unless your skill is really above and beyond. The end result is a group of awesome people who do outstanding work.
dmix 7y ago
This would be great for tech startups. Especially globally. They'll be able to out-compete the big unionized tech companies so much easier!

tsomctl 7y ago

What I've heard anecdotally is that the union contracts for the linemen are written in terms of copper wire. Since fiber optic is not copper, AT&T is doing everything they can to get rid of the union guys and their expensive paychecks.

Spooky23 7y ago

That’s a scenario they created. There’s no reason the man in the van can’t hang up a WISP device or whatever. I used to run a field tech services org — it’s not that expensive to train new tasks, the hardest thing is hiring reliable people. Your old school HP and IBM CEs would service everything for 95% of service calls. They are busting the CWA, period. The same thing happened with National Grid in upstate NY. They’ll use 5 subcontractors and 10 guys to do a job that was handled by a 2-3 man crew 20 years ago. The hilarious thing is that that union didn’t have the stupid separation of duty stuff the contractors do. I saw one instance where they had a subcontractor on site specifically to spray bee spray.

gridlockd 7y ago
In other words, union labor is so burdensome, it can't even compete with 5x the manpower?
- Spooky23 7y ago
  More likely they are aging out the workforce.
kelnos 7y ago
Is there a rational reason why companies would prefer to hire 3-5x the workers to do the same job, just to avoid having to deal with a union? Or is it all just union-related FUD?
- bluGill 7y ago
  If you don't have work you don't pay the contractor. You still pay employees. Depending on the work this can be good or bad. When you have employees you also get flexibility in scheduling them. A contractor is expected to have other jobs and sometimes cannot get to your critical need right now. A contractor can sometimes give you a better deal because of those other customers who are willing to pay extra for last minute service.
  - 7y ago

lern2code 7y ago

...to re-train the copper linemen to work with the new technologies. The problem with this is that its' expensive. Insanely expensive. So... What you're telling me is that, if we were to automate lots of jobs with AI and robotics, those that lose their jobs would mostly be stranded jobless, as it would be too expensive for them to retrain for emerging jobs, or really any job at all? That the idea of technology eliminating jobs, but also creating new opportunities is laughably unrealistic?

DaniloDias 7y ago

The real scandal is not even close to being covered: The 23k jobs that have been cut are predominantly aging boomers who were offered packages to retire. There is plenty of new hiring, almost exclusively targeting millennial dev-ops people as AT&T tries to mimic Silicon Valley. The union people will not be going anywhere. This is a muckraker of an article.

walshemj 7y ago
That depends when BT did that a lot of people took redundancy and jumped over to competitors - there is a joke that BT's reduandancy scheme built the UK's mobile network.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago

An additional factor is that fibre-optic generally requires less maintenance, so even given the same scale of network there'd be a smaller workforce required.

oh_sigh 7y ago

> 64 year old Joe Schmoe with average performance stats to get this expensive training if 24 year old Billy Bob with a 'young man's' performance record is also asking to get trained. Even if Joe Schmoe has much better performance, it may still make sense to train Billy Bob. If training is truly expensive, and takes 5 years to pay off, odds are Joe is going to be retired at that point and it will be a waste of money.