AT&T Moving 2,000 Jobs—Back Home

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/21/att-moving-2000-jobs%e2%80%94back-home/

AT&T Moving 2,000 Jobs—Back Home

by James Parks, Sep 21, 2006

AT&T is returning some tech-based jobs to the United States, a move that could create 2,000 new union jobs in the Internet/DSL support field—and a sign of union strength in tackling the exporting of jobs.

In an agreement reached yesterday with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), AT&T will create more than 800 new jobs under CWA representation beginning next year. Some 1,200 customer service jobs now filled by overseas contractors—many in India—will be returned to the United States starting sometime later next year.

CWA Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach says:

Reversing the flow of work from contractors back to our bargaining units is a terrific achievement. We’re also pleased that the wages and benefits we’ve negotiated, in addition to being superior to those in the industry, will provide a base for CWA to build career opportunities for even more workers.

CWA and AT&T negotiated the wage rate, benefits and job duties for the new position of Tier 1 customer assistant as part of the 2005 National Internet Contract. That contract expires July 21, 2007.

Alex Colvin, labor studies professor at Penn State University, told the San Antonio Express-News:

I think this is a considerable victory for labor. They won it at the bargaining table using traditional labor leverage at a time when people talk about unions’ dwindling influence.

The AT&T move is part of a growing awareness by corporations that outsourcing is not as productive as businesses once thought. In fact, one in four businesses surveyed last year by accounting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu brought back exported work after realizing they could handle the functions more cheaply in the United States.



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Tags: Communications Workers of America, AT&T, outsourcing, collective bargaining
Channels: Organizing & Bargaining

[Downtown Hound]

1. In addition to the new jobs

This means that I can finally understand the operators on the other end of the line now! Yay!

[Warpy]

3. The language barrier is one of two problems

people have with overseas vendors. The other is poor telephone connections, themselves. Take someone who speaks good but heavily accented English and add a line that sounds like somebody is frying eggs in his cubicle, and it's no wonder customers in the US get frustrated and often rude.

I expect more customer service jobs to be moved back to the US. People in India will still be involved, but if there is too much of a barrier, they'll just transfer the calls back to the US.

[GOPBasher]

2. What the hell is going on?

Did I just hear some good news? Since when do we ever have good news in the past six years? What the hell is going on? I'm confused. :shrug:

[onehandle]

4. A drop in the bucket.

A few here. A few there. Followed by a particularly loud press release.

Consulting and outsourcing companies are building multi-million dollar technology centers in Southern Asia.

The jobs are still flowing there like water.

Trust me. I see the numbers first hand.

Trust me.

[Human Torch]

5. When they were still Pacific Bell...

...before they were SBC, and before they were AT&T, a supervisor in the DSL department told me they were going to do this.

"Tier One" support...the India call stations...what a mess. The supervisor, based in San Francisco, told me that customers had the right to give "name, rank and serial number"...the basic contact info and account details...and then demand to be escalated to Tier Two support (San Francisco Bay Area).

The folks in India were reading a script. You'd call in and they'd ask you to hold and they'd scan the script and give you a canned answer that solved the problem 5% of the time. Long-time customers knew the script better than they did and tried ALL of those options before calling in. Sometimes the support person spoke fluent English. Other times it was incredibly fractured English. I can't name a single instance in which Tier One support solved my problem. 100% of the time I had to go to Tier Two, sometimes above.

At the time...about a year and a half ago...the supervisor told me that when the India call center contracts expired, that was it...tech support was coming home.

Nice to see he was telling me the truth. Whatever the article claims, the homecoming was in response to livid customer complaints. That's the truth of the matter. Communication was crap, and the skill level was somewhere around entry level. As a paying customer I demand more. So did a lot of other people. For Pac Bell / SBC / AT&T, outsourcing was an experiment that failed miserably. End of story.

:patriot: