AT&T CEO Nabbed Record $32 Million Compensation In 2019, Despite Rampant Bumbling, Layoffs

from the ill-communication dept

Last year wasn't a particularly good one for AT&T. Despite spending more than $150 billion in mergers in a bid to dominate the streaming video space, the company instead lost 4 million TV subscribers on the year, not exactly what company executives were aiming for. Not only did AT&T's mergers saddle the company with a mountain of debt, the company then tried to extract that debt from its customers in the form of numerous price hikes, ignoring that's not how streaming TV competition is going to work. The company also bumbled its streaming TV branding so badly, it confused even the company's own marketing and support departments.

That's before you get to AT&T's empty promises in 2019, which include receiving billions in regulatory favors (like killing net neutrality and privacy rules at the FCC), subsidies, and $42 billion in Trump tax cuts for promises that never materialized. Not only did they not materialize, but AT&T actually engaged in the exact opposite behavior it had originally promised, trimming overall network investment and laying off nearly 37,000 jobs just since the Trump tax cuts were announced.

Now your first question is probably but how is AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson doing in the wake of all this? Well you'll be happy to know he's just fine: Stephenson received a record $32 million in compensation in 2019, despite a wave of bungled merger mania so intense it even pissed off the company's investors, triggering a revolt. But yes, good job, Randall:

"AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson's total compensation was more than $32 million in 2019, giving him a 10 percent raise while he slashed tens of thousands of jobs and reduced spending on network upgrades. Stephenson's total compensation was $28.72 million in 2017, $29.12 million in 2018, and $32.03 million in 2019, an AT&T filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission said. His pay raise was driven by stock performance."

In short, AT&T's employees have been asked to share the brunt of Stephenson's missteps, while Stephenson himself saw his pay increase dramatically. Not too surprisingly, the thousands of AT&T employees fired aren't particularly okay with that:

"That felt like a complete slap in the face, saying how great we were but here is your final pay stub because we did so great last year so we’re going to keep this money and not invest in back into the employment force like they said they would,” said Lorenzano, who worked at the company for over four years before receiving his termination notice, along with dozens of other AT&T DirecTV technicians across California."

Again, you'll see no shortage of stories ahead of mergers (like AT&T Time Warner, or T-Mobile Sprint) parroting telecom companies usually false claims that such megadeals create "amazing new synergies." In reality, they generally involve head fakes and layoffs, yet for every 1,000 stories hyping the claimed benefits of such deals, there's only a handful that follow up to see if those promises actually materialized. When it comes to AT&T, nearly everything the company promised would happen in 2019 failed to happen. And while the employees and customers paid the price, its CEO was, once again, handsomely rewarded.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, jobs, layoffs, randall stephenson
Companies: at&t

Right On Cue, Post-Merger T-Mobile Layoffs Begin

from the round-and-round-we-go dept

US courts and regulators recently rubber stamped the T-Mobile Sprint merger, ignoring forty years of history showing how US telecom megamergers almost always result in less competition, higher prices, and fewer jobs. Eliminating one of just four US wireless carriers is likely to result in higher prices (see: Canada or Ireland). Wall Street analysts and unions alike predict the deal could eliminate anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs, and data suggests the consolidation could result in employees across the sector making less money even if they work at other companies.

Like most mergers, T-Mobile and Sprint executives have spent a year telling people none of this will actually happen and critics were being hyperbolic. Executives like John Legere (whose leaving in April and thus won't have to bear witness to his own handiwork) insisted repeatedly that the competition-eroding deal would somehow increase competition and create thousands of new, high paying jobs. Real world analysis from numerous experts never supported that, and early returns on those promises aren't looking so hot.

Light Reading late last week reported that with the ink not even dry on the merger, the company was already starting to trim jobs at one of its prepaid phone divisions, Metro:

"According to three people familiar with the company, T-Mobile has laid off a number of employees within its Metro by T-Mobile prepaid business. The extent of the layoffs is unclear. The company couldn't immediately provide a response to questions from Light Reading on the topic.

T-Mobile did not respond to repeated requests from me for comment on the nature of the layoffs. Neither would the company respond to inquiries made by other outlets like Ars Technica or Fierce Wireless. That suggests to me these layoffs were indeed merger related, since T-Mobile could have simply stated that the departures were scheduled pre-merger, assuming that was true.

Peter Adderton, founder of prepaid wireless provider Boost Mobile, was backing the deal just a few months ago. His tone has now completely shifted, and he noted that a lot of these laid off employees were informed of the layoffs during an impersonal conference call:

Like most US telecom mergers, around 4% of the journalists that uncritically hyped this merger's "synergies" will go back in a few years and scrutinize the company's pre-merger promises. And all of the think tankers and analysts that rubber stamped the deal uncritically will go mute in a few years when the price hikes and additional retail and middle management layoffs arrive, pretending they had some other, mysterious origins. This is, apparently, just how we do things in America, a country that seems habitually incapable of learning much of anything from history or experience.

Filed Under: competition, jobs, layoffs, mergers
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

AT&T Keeps On Firing Employees Despite Claims The Trump Tax Cut Would Boost Job Growth

from the not-the-droids-you're-looking-for dept

It seems like only yesterday that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was promising on live TV that if Trump followed through on his tax cuts, the company would dramatically boost investment, in the process creating thousands of new jobs. Not "entry-level jobs," mind you, but at least "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in the ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year." Each $1 billion in new investment, AT&T insisted, would result in 7,000 such jobs. "Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages," Stephenson said.

We've pointed out several times how these promises meant absolutely nothing, but AT&T itself keeps driving the point home.

AT&T's earnings released last week showed that the company has eliminated 37,818 jobs since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) (which dropped AT&T's overall tax rate to 21% providing the company an estimated $46 billion in savings) was cheerily passed by Congress just three or so years ago:

"The Communications Workers of America, the telecom sector’s biggest union, says AT&T’s promised jobs never arrived either. Union officials today complained that AT&T earnings show the company has laid off 37,818 employees worldwide since the tax cut was passed in 2018, with 4,040 pink slips sent out to employees worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone."

Again that promised network investment never occurred either. AT&T's fourth quarter CAPEX was the lowest in a decade, and this year AT&T's expected to trim its overall investment somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion. The money? It went into executive pockets, investor pockets, and the company's massive debt load created by mindless merger mania.

We've noted a few times that making outlandish promises, grabbing billions in government favors (merger approval, tax breaks, regulatory help, whatever), then delivering jack shit is something AT&T and other telecom giants have been doing for the better part of a generation without no penalty whatsoever. None.

The same promises were made by AT&T and its primary lobbying arm (US Telecom) ahead of the net neutrality repeal. There too, AT&T promised job growth and massive new investment into broadband networks in exchange for the FCC basically self immolating its consumer protection authority. But when it came time to collect on said promises, as usual, they were nowhere to be found. The same head fake bait and switch also occurred ahead of AT&T's merger with Time Warner, which was also supposed to deliver investment, competition, and "synergies" that AT&T's earnings report shows never actually arrived.

Despite the evidence here being indisputable, somehow we never learn our lesson, and AT&T never faces any meaningful penalty. Worse, the folks that often pride themselves on standing up to government spending (like grumbling about some small town deciding to build its own broadband network) are routinely nowhere to be found when it comes time to discuss what's arguably one of the biggest, long running cons in American history.

Filed Under: donald trump, jobs, tax cuts
Companies: at&t

California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Says She Simply Doesn't Believe All Of Those Who Have Been Harmed By Her AB5 Bill

from the so-caring dept

We've written a few times now about California's AB5 law that has more or less made it difficult to impossible for many freelancers/contractors to still work in California. Even though the stated intentions of the bill's author, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, and its supporters was to "protect" workers, the reality is anything but that. It's yet another case of politicians who have no clue how the world actually works, insisting that what they're doing must work fine because their intentions are good. Many people who have been impacted by this have found that Gonzalez has been dismissive of their concerns -- and at times directly rude to people on Twitter highlighting these issues. We had thought that perhaps Gonzalez had realized there might be a more constructive way at the end of last year when she asked for thoughts on a possible small tweak to the law. That change would have been wildly insufficient, but it was, at least, a step in the right direction.

However, with the new year, we apparently have the same old Lorena Gonzalez. She was interviewed on local San Diego TV station KUSI, and was obnoxiously dismissive of the idea that people have actually been harmed by her law. The newscasters highlighted actual people who were losing work because of the law, and Gonzalez's response was that she doesn't believe the people. In one case, they showed an interview with a freelance translator -- who actually had worked for the state and even for Gonazlez herself, and had voted for her -- who said she can't get work any more because of AB5, and Gonzalez appears to dismiss her as not telling the truth.

I'm sorry, and I feel that she does feel that way. But, I don't think it's true

She then claims that (of course) unnamed translator companies have been telling her they love AB5 because other companies have been undercutting them by bringing in freelancers.

Multiple people are shown talking about how this law is negatively impacting them, and time and time again Gonzalez dismisses their concerns or insists they can just "form a business" and be exempt. She jumps in, as soon as the interview starts, to say that she just doesn't believe that thousands of people have been put out of work. But notice that she's choosing her words carefully -- saying that people have been "put out of work." But freelancers who are just not getting the jobs they used to aren't "put out of work," they're just not seeing any new work like they used to. Gonzalez's entire framing of the issue suggests she still has no idea how freelancing works.

Hilariously, just minutes later, Gonzalez then completely dismisses more examples of freelancers who are losing work because of AB5. The reporters at the TV station highlight Vox Media's decision to cut off 200 freelancers in California and Gonzalez responds:

First of all, it wasn't a job. Those aren't jobs. Those are freelance positions.

Uh, yes. And now they're gone. She goes on to try to dismiss all of those Vox writers, by suggesting that it was more of a side thing. But, uh, the whole point is that those "side" jobs aren't available any more, and it ignores how many freelancers pile up a bunch of those kinds of gigs to make a living -- with the flexibility that they want.

KUSI then shows an interview with an independent contractor political cartoonist, who notes that even if you're exempt from the law, as a private business (Gonzalez keeps falling back to the idea that any freelancer can set up their own corporation -- which costs a lot of money, by the way -- and then they're exempt), media companies don't want to deal with the risk and aren't hiring them any more. Rather than respond to the actual concerns of the cartoonist, Gonazlez goes into a semantics argument saying that merely using the terms "hire and fire" show that we're talking about jobs, not contractors. But, uh, no, that's not how any of this works.

As the interview ends, she says that "thousands" of (nameless) people have been thanking her because they "now have jobs" thanks to AB5. What's amazing is that apparently none of those people have social media or have talked to any news organizations, because all of the people publicly discussing AB5 appear to be freelancers and contractors who are losing business because of the bill.

Oh, and just to put a kicker on this. Just as the interview was being conducted, the NY Times opened up a job request for a freelancer to cover California real estate. Oh, but they can't live in California because of AB5.

They're not the only ones, of course. Late last year, local news site Patch, which hires many freelancers, announced that it was looking to hire people to cover California... but only if they didn't live in California.

What comes up time and time again, and which Gonzalez keeps dismissing, is that tons of these freelancers want to be freelancers and don't want to be employees. And she, without understanding these industries, keeps insisting that she knows better, and that they'd be better off with jobs they don't want. It's a mess.

Filed Under: ab5, california, contractors, freelancers, jobs, lorena gonzalez, work

AT&T Said Trump Tax Cuts Would Create Thousands Of Jobs. Instead, AT&T's Laying Off Thousands.

from the head-fake dept

It seems like only yesterday that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was promising on live television that if Trump followed through on his tax cuts, the company would dramatically boost investment, in the process creating thousands of new jobs. Not "entry-level jobs," mind you, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in the ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year." Each $1 billion in new investment, AT&T insisted, would result in 7,000 new jobs. "Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages," Stephenson said.

Yeah, about that.

Here on planet Earth, AT&T has revealed that the company's slated CAPEX for 2020 will actually be decreasing by about $3 billion next year. The company is also preparing to engage in a new round of significant job cuts as it fights off an ongoing investor revolt triggered by the company's bumbling obsession with merger mania, and a continued exodus of video subscribers caused by relentless price hikes and branding incompetence.

It's unclear how many employees will lose their jobs and/or benefits with this latest round of cuts (one of several in just the last few years), but the scale isn't expected to be subtle:

"Everything is on the table," AT&T COO John Stankey said Tuesday at the UBS Global TMT Conference in New York. "It's a target-rich environment."

AT&T's cost-reduction program initially will include a 4% cut in the operator's labor expenses -- representing roughly $1.5 billion of the operator's finances -- next year. During an investor event last week, AT&T CFO John Stephens explained that the initiative would target employees, contractors, benefits "and so forth."

That is, if you're playing along at home, the precise opposite of what Stephenson promised.

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 as promised, the company 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. Anything even vaguely resembling accountability for these false promises has been utterly nonexistent.

The dip in overall CAPEX is also the exact opposite of what AT&T claimed when it lobbied for the elimination of net neutrality. You'll recall AT&T executives and lobbyists repeatedly claimed that the FCC's net neutrality rules stifled sector investment, a claim indisputably disproven by an endless number of studies and reports. Even telecom CEOs themselves are on record clearly stating this investment apocalypse never actually occurred. Granted, it's worth noting AT&T has received countless billions in other regulatory favors thanks to a rubber stamp FCC; efforts just as unlikely to result in new jobs or network investment.

Again, nobody anywhere has actually held AT&T accountable for these falsehoods. Nor is there any indication, on absolutely any front, that anybody intends to. And in the post-truth era, the folks who supported throwing billions at AT&T for doing nothing still somehow suggest the decision worked wonders, despite a convoy of evidence and data making it abundantly clear that's not true. All told, you can be fairly sure we'll learn absolutely nothing from this experience, and before long AT&T will line up, hand outstretched, quite accurately expecting Uncle Sam to repeat the process all over again.

After all, the company has been engaged in some variation of the same tap dance for the better part of the last few decades with only fleeting efforts to do anything about it.

Filed Under: donald trump, jobs, layoffs, randall stephenson, tax cuts
Companies: at&t

Bad Laws And The Best Of Intentions: Law Designed To 'Protect' Gig Workers May Destroy Journalism Freelancers

from the bad-ideas-done-badly dept

For years there have been arguments about the whole "gig work" economy, and how the various "gig workers" should be classified. Specifically, it historically came down to a question of whether or not they should be seen as contractors/freelancers or employees. Of course, the real answer should probably be "neither" and there should be a different classification altogether (if we must classify them). However, following a California Supreme Court ruling that found that the so-called "ABC Test" should be used for determining employment, California pushed for a law codifying that rule, which would, in theory, force tons of companies to reclassify contract/gig workers as "employees." Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law last month with a signing statement that claimed it was to combat the "hollowing out of our middle-class..." and suggesting this will somehow help workers.

Of course, there's what politicians say, and what their bills will actually do. And, so far, this bill, AB5, is looking like it will be a complete and utter disaster. First of all, on the side of gig workers for companies like Uber/Lyft/etc., those companies have already made it clear that they don't think the law applies to them, even though they were the kinds of companies most often cited when discussing the law. On top of that, they're pushing for a ballot measure that would effectively exempt them from the law even if it does apply to them (we've already discussed in the past just how ridiculous California's ballot measure procedure is...).

So, there's a damn good chance that this law won't come close to impacting the types of workers everyone was told it was designed to benefit. Instead... who it might hurt most are... journalists. A huge part of the journalism world works with freelance journalists, and they're now all realizing that the law may make journalism freelancing close to impossible. The author of AB5 had an apparently arbitrary and nonsensical standard applied to the bill concerning who would no longer qualify as a freelance journalist: anyone who writes more than 35 articles per year for a publication.

As for how lawmakers settled on the 35-submission figure, Gonzalez says that she and her team decided that a weekly columnist sounded like a part-time worker and so halved that worker's yearly submissions. After protest from some freelancers, the number was bumped up to 35. "Was it a little arbitrary? Yeah. Writing bills with numbers like that are a little bit arbitrary," she says.

That... is not good. When the lawmaker herself is admitting the process was effectively picking a number out of thin air and then making arbitrary adjustments. That's bad. And journalists are quite reasonably freaking out:

The author of the bill, Lorena Gonzales, has been responding on Twitter aggressively defending the plan. She eventually felt enough pressure to admit that she's open to change... but that they can't be put in place until after the law goes into effect in January.

Of course, that doesn't ease any of the concerns of tons of journalism freelancers, especially in California, who are completely screwed by this "arbitrary" standard that completely messes up their ability to be journalism freelancers. Also this comes after she retweeted someone calling one of the freelance journalists calling out the problems of this bill "a selfish piece of shit."

There are, clearly, good intentions behind this law. The concern about exploitation of workers by companies -- especially giant multi-billion dollar operations -- is a legitimate concern. But, as with so much that happens when you get politicians trying to write legislation without truly understanding what's happening, you get an end result that that doesn't solve the actual problem of exploitation, and only serves to make life worse for people who have the least power in the situation in the first place.

Filed Under: ab5, abc test, california, classifications, freelance, freelancers, gig economy, gig work, jobs, journalism, lorena gonazalez

Welcome To Working Futures: 14 Speculative Fiction Stories About The Future Of Work

from the get-to-work dept

Order your copy of Working Futures today »

Last week, I gave you a heads up and a preview of our latest project from our think tank, the Copia Institute: our brand new anthology of speculative fiction about the future of work, called Working Futures. The book is now available in both ebook and paperback format at Amazon (initially, we'll be publishing it exclusively through Amazon, though we plan to offer other options down the road). You can purchase the ebook for $2.99, the paperpack for $9.99, or both combined for $10.99 (or, if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can read it for free). The book has 14 wonderful stories and comes in at over 200 pages. You can also purchase the special custom deck of cards we used to help us create the scenarios that were given to the authors as "prompts" to inspire the various stories. And you can download the PDF of the prompts as well, if you'd like to see them.

Last week, I wrote about the process by which this project came together -- how we built the custom deck of cards, what we did with them, and how we got sci-fi writers to make use of them. This week, with the actual launch of the book, I wanted to zoom in a bit on the actual stories in the book. Over the next few days, I'll talk a bit about some of the stories in the book, and what made them stand out when we were choosing the stories for the book:

The Machine Starts by Liam Hogan is a quick fun story that envisions the role of humans in a world in which computer AI is pretty much all pervasive, and an entity known as "The Machine", whose powers are so great that it resulted in the demise of the today's generation of internet giants. But with something so powerful and all knowing, why would it need to hire people? Well, as this story demonstrates, there are always situations in which human perception will be able to do things that artificial intelligence cannot.

The Chaperone by Andrew Dana Hudson is, in some ways, a flipside to the story by Hogan that precedes it. In that story we learn about how a human can assist an AI, whereas in the Chaperone, we learn about how AI's might assist humans. For better and for worse. Hudson described his story in a pretty straightforward tweet: "My #solarpunk novellete, "The Chaperone," is for everyone who watched Her (2013) and thought, "cool future, but this doesn't seem like *our* future—where's the late stage capitalism, political upheaval and climate change??"

The Funeral Company by Katharine Dow might conceivably take place in a similar world to the one in Hudson's novellette above, though on the other side of the country. It describes a very different kind of job that might crop up in a world of pervasive information and data about everyone -- and also how some people might respond to not wanting to live in such a world.

That's it for today. I'll have more later in the week about some of the other stories in the book. If any of the three snippets above intrigue you, or you can't wait to hear about the other stories... feel free to go ahead and pick up the book.

Filed Under: ai, bioengineering, future of work, genetic engineering, jobs, speculative fiction, working futures

T-Mobile Employees Want Promises They Won't Be Fired Post Merger

from the good-luck-with-that dept

We've noted repeatedly how the Sprint, T-Mobile merger isn't great. There's forty years of history showing how telecom industry megamergers almost always result in less competition, higher prices, and fewer jobs, and this deal is no exception. Eliminating one of just four US wireless carriers is likely to result in higher prices (see: Canada or Ireland). And Wall Street analysts not only predict the deal could eliminate anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs, data suggests the consolidation could result in employees across the sector making less money even if they work at other companies.

Of course if you ask T-Mobile and Sprint executives, they'll tell you that none of this will actually happen. They'll tell you that the deal will somehow create more competition and jobs, despite (again) history showing that this rarely, if ever happens and such deals almost exclusively benefit executives and shareholders.

Hoping for a little reassurance, T-Mobile employees this week penned a letter to Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hoettges (Deutsche Telekom has a majority stake in T-Mobile) asking for guarantees they won't see layoffs and pay cuts in the wake of the deal:

"T-Mobile US retail employees and technicians delivered a letter late Tuesday for Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hoettges, seeking assurances that their jobs and paychecks will be safe if the wireless carrier is allowed to merge with Sprint, its smaller rival.

T-Mobile Workers United, with about 500 members and backed by the Communications Workers of America and the German union ver.di, urged Hoettges to “make solid and verifiable” assurances that jobs will be safe, paychecks will not shrink and management will not interfere in union activities."

These workers shouldn't hold their breath.

From Comcast to AT&T, telecom merger after telecom merger begins with a laundry list of promises that nothing whatsoever will change and if things do change, it will only be for the better. Then, everything changes as redundant retail support, and executive positions are inevitably eliminated. It's a finely oiled machine you could set your watch to, yet each time a new merger is proposed the press collectively nods dumbly as if pre-merger guarantees mean much of anything, and government doesn't have a multi-generational history of failing to hold companies accountable when they blatantly ignore merger conditions.

It's a problem that's particularly pronounced in the telecom sector, where tens of thousands of jobs are being lost due to mindless consolidation and a mantra of "growth for growth's sake." Saturated growth in fixed and mobile broadband has driven companies to mergers in the hopes of attaining growth, but as AT&T's Time Warner and DirecTV acquisitions or Frontier's gobbling up of aging phone lines have made clear, being bigger doesn't magically equate to being better. In fact it's usually the opposite as even bigger, debt-saddled companies fail to scale customer service to handle the growth.

Why the US seems incapable of learning from history on this subject is a question for the ages. Right Now, T-Mobile is telling regulators that the merger will magically create thousands of new jobs. It's also promising to keep both Sprint's Overland Park, Kansas and T-Mobile's Bellevue, Washington headquarters both intact. All while we see zero negative impact and increased competition despite fewer overall competitors. History has repeatedly shown such claims to be little more than fluff and nonsense, yet regulators at both the FCC and DOJ (both not coincidentally now run by former telecom lawyers) are happy to believe the promises.

Filed Under: consolidation, employees, jobs, mergers
Companies: sprint, t-mobile