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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11. 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Happy New Year! You're fired!
That's the message AT&T Chair Robert E. Allen is giving to 40,000 telephone and computer workers. These job cuts-- scheduled to be carried out throughout 1996--followed AT&T's announcement in November letting 72,000 managers know they were expendable.
"I truly wish we didn't have to do this downsizing," Allen said in a handout to the media.
No one should be fooled by these crocodile tears. AT&T made a $4.71 billion profit in 1994.
It's only the labor of workers that produces these profits for AT&T's stockholders. Divide these profits by the 302,000 employees on the payroll as of January 1995 and you get $15,596 garnered from every one.
That's nearly $7.50 per hour that was stolen from each AT&T worker in unpaid wages.
Actually, the rate of these unpaid wages is much higher since top boss Allen and thousands of smaller bosses are counted as "employees."
According to AT&T, the average clerical employee being laid off in New Jersey has 18 years on the job. As many as 7,000 AT&T workers--the majority of them women--will be laid off in the Garden State alone.
Robert Allen--or his media spin doctors--must have been inspired by Oliver Stone's movie about Richard Nixon to say that "compassion will be an essential ingredient in the handling of the job cuts." AT&T is showing so much compassion that a fired union worker will get as little as one week in severance pay.
Monica Moorehead, Workers World Party candidate for president, called on President Bill Clinton to sign an executive order prohibiting these layoffs.
Said Moorehead: "AT&T is a criminal corporation that should be brought to trial. The more billions of dollars in profits it steals from the workers, the greedier it becomes.
"AT&T is the biggest example of corporations making record profits while continuing to fire people. If this is what the capitalist system has to offer the masses even during a so- called period of prosperity, what will happen in the economic crisis that is sure to follow?
"The labor movement needs to raise the demand of a shorter work day with no cut in pay to fight these wholesale firings. But that's only the beginning of the struggle. Capitalism, especially in this high-tech stage, is a system that makes the rich richer and all workers poorer. Only socialism can provide employment for all," said Moorehead.
One million people worked for AT&T before its "break-up" in the 1980s.
AT&T was the world's model corporation. And it set the standard for corporate racism and sexism.
Mention should be made of AT&T hiring practices-- particularly since the corporation put nearly half its so- called managers, 72,000 people, on notice they should take an early out and has started to lay off some of the rest.
Many of the "managers" are really workers who were kept out of the union's bargaining unit. For example, a secretary who handles one "confidential" document can be considered as management under current labor-law interpretations.
AT&T is so big that no single big capitalist family controls it. Rather, it is run by a coalition of all the big financial groups. Representatives of the Rockefellers, the Morgan banking group and others are on its board of directors.
Even since the break-up of AT&T in the 1980s--with the spin-off of the regional telephone companies--AT&T has assets worth nearly $80 billion.
The so-called "baby Bells"--the regional telephone companies that were spun off--are no tiny outfits either. NYNEX has $30 billion in assets. U.S. West is worth $23 billion.
The break-up was carried out in the name of "anti- monopoly." Actually the federal government did it with the consent of AT&T so the company could be a big player in computers and electronics.
AT&T's position in the 1980s was increasingly untenable. Its virtual monopoly of telephone service was being undermined by the technological revolution.
Increasingly, foreign manufacturers of telephone equipment were competing for PBX switch exchanges for businesses. The biggest maker of phone equipment is no longer AT&T's captive Western Electric. It's Atcatel of France.
The break-up of AT&T was the single most profitable event for Wall Street. Hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions came from the sale of stock in the "new" AT&T and the baby Bells.
Since the break-up AT&T has spent billions of dollars buying up McCaw--the biggest company in wireless communications--and NCR, the computer and cash register manufacturer.
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