AT&T’s Jobs Gambit
AT&T (NYSE: T) has made a clever move to make its buyout of T-Mobile more attractive to government regulators. The huge telecommunications company says it will add 5,000 call-center jobs once the deal is done. The jobs already exist, but…
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This plan is a token gesture at best. AT&T employs 260,000 people, and it has laid off thousands in its shrinking landline business. The company’s net employment count in the U.S. is almost certain to fall over the next two years as it makes expense reductions ahead of landline attrition.
Many large American companies are cynical when they make announcements about job additions. Regulators should know better than to take AT&T’s bait. It is hardly a plan to keep employment levels across all of its divisions in America at higher levels than before. What AT&T spends to make good on its promise almost certainly will come out of worker expenses somewhere else.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
