On January 4, 2019 a company memo went out from Jeff McElfresh that a major restructure and workforce calibration would be taking place. Over the 2-3 weeks that followed, it was estimated that 8-10% of the employees under McElfresh would be affected. This, conservatively, would make the numbers about 8-10,000 people losing their job as the company directory has 169,000 employees under McElfresh. What I, and several others have wondered, is how the news reported this, or rather how they DIDN'T report on this.
Shockingly, CNN and many other news outlets reported how Verizon asked for volunteers to leave the company and managed to get 10,400 to voluntary leave. But AT&T surplussed 8-10K employees (management and non-management collectively for Q1) and nothing seems to have gotten reported. Now, I thought it was normal for bad news to get reported before good or neutral news, and I thought a surplus event of 8-10K in Q1 2019 would have been better bad news to report than, say, reporting 10K of volunteers at Verizon but then I had to think about the whole Time-Warner merger and the benefits [to AT&T] therein.
AT&T now owns CNN. So, naturally the cynic in anyone would reach the conclusion there isn't a way for AT&T's CNN to report on them ousting 8-10K employees in one quarter and I doubt the Trump-favored Fox is going to report on such a line item as then Trump would have to respond to that. And I know of a lot of people that were affected by this current surplus, the larger in one swipe of a long succession of swipes that have affected every company division, including those high-profit divisions such as mobility. And the worse icing on this surplus cake is that AT&t has an European workforce of about 8,000, some 5,600 in the former Warsaw Pack country of Czechoslovakia (now the republics of Slovaki and Czech).
So, it is nice that Verizon got so many volunteers, but it is almost sinful that AT&T can surplus so many in one quarter while their overseas work forces have remained exempt from such reductions since it all began back in 2014. The cuts this time will affect 5G, but then again AT&T has that covered by calling its 4G/LTE by the new name 5Ge.