Submitted via IRC for Bytram
AT&T Lays Off Thousands After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks And Regulatory Favors
Back in November of 2017 AT&T promised that if it received a tax break from the Trump administration, it would invest an additional $1 billion back into its network and employees. At the time, CEO Randall Stephenson proclaimed that "every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs." Not "entry-level jobs," AT&T promised, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year."
Yeah, about that.
The Trump tax cut resulted in AT&T getting billions in immediate tax relief, and roughly $3 billion in tax savings annually, in perpetuity. Yet when it came time for AT&T to re-invest this money back into its network and employees, AT&T actually did the opposite and began laying them off in droves. Unions claim AT&T has laid off an estimated 23,000 workers worldwide since the Trump tax plan, with investors and executives unsurprisingly pocketing the savings. This week, the word came down that AT&T would be laying off thousands more as it wraps up fiber deployment:
"Leaked internal documents confirmed most of the 1,800 planned job cuts. One AT&T surplus declaration shows that more than 900 of the surplus jobs come from the company's Southeast division in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. This document attributes most of the cuts to "economic" reasons and some to "technological/operational efficiency."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 21 2019, @02:57PM (1 child)
There's the problem right there- why invest money for future gains when you can just send it straight to the stockholders, most of whom aren't really interested in anything beyond 90 days out anyway?
What they need to do is give the big corporations 3 billion dollars, contingent on them investing one billion of it and providing those 7000 jobs to the hard-hat workers so they can afford a house in the suburbs if they have a wife who also earns income... then the other 2 billion can be distributed among the investors so they can buy their second yachts and it's a win-win. Hey, if the investors are lazy and don't protect themselves against capital gains taxes, $400 million of that $3B will even flow back to the source through taxes, so it's really a bargain proposition at $2.6B net cost to the taxpayers to actually get those 7000 jobs, as opposed to a paltry $1B that only went to the investors and netted negative new jobs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @03:21PM
No. How about they pay taxes like everyone else.
No more tax breaks! We are broke! Pay the debt and fix the infrastructure.