As AT&T announces holiday layoff of hundreds of workers
Corporate America begins campaign to sell Trump tax bonanza
By
Patrick Martin
23 December 2017
The enactment of the largest tax cut for the rich in modern history has triggered a series of announcements by major corporations that they are going to “do more for their employees” by using a small portion of the windfall to increase wages and pay bonuses.
These actions are cynical in the extreme, as the companies involved are passing on only a fraction of the bonanza they will receive from the slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. AT&T, for example, is expected to rake in $1.6 billion in additional income next year just from the lower tax rate—not counting other favorable provisions, whose impact is still unreported—of which it is setting aside $200 million, one-eighth of the total, to pay $1,000 bonuses to its 200,000 corporate employees.
Meanwhile, the telecom giant is going ahead with the holiday layoff of an estimated 600 workers in five states it announced on December 16. The workers, both indoor and outdoor technicians in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, will be out of a job as of January 4.
In February of 2016, the New York Times, citing “senior executives” at AT&T, reported that the company was planning to slash its workforce by up to 30 percent, or 60,000 jobs, over the next five years. The article quoted CEO Randall Stephenson as advising AT&T workers to “learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited”—a threat to carry out mass firings.
The actual cost of AT&T’s “generosity” will be considerably less than $200 million, since the company will write off the cost of the bonuses as a business expense, reducing its…