Slashdot Mirror
More Than 20,000 AT&T Workers Are Getting Ready To Protest Nationwide (fortune.com)
Aaron Pressman, reporting for Fortune: Some 21,000 workers in AT&T's wireless business have overwhelming voted to authorize a strike just ahead of the expiration of their contract on Saturday. The vote, which was expected, comes after 17,000 additional workers in AT&T's phone, internet, and cable services in Nevada and California also approved a strike authorization last month. They have been working without a contract since April. But despite the strike authorization votes -- a common tactic to increase pressure on management during labor negotiations -- AT&T said it was still seeking to find common ground with its workers. Unlike some of its peers, AT&T has had a long run of labor peace with its workers and their main union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
It's more that they want more money diverted to their own pockets. The same as the rest of us, really.
The main thrust of prices is you're paying the wages of workers providing goods and services. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are big outliers with their 25% profit margins, and Tesla's luxury niche lets them get 22% in a market where Ford and GM make in the 12% range; people like to look at these and at single-quarter or single-year profits of healthcare companies (some as high as 49% net profit margins) and claim businesses are taking all the money. On average, American businesses are getting less than 10% of all spending as profit; the rest of the total income is wages. Even some of the big healthcare companies swinging 49% in some years are pulling 30% and higher net losses in others, averaging 11%-14% (which is still high).
You get a narrative where people want higher wages and claim businesses should just take less profit. or CEOs should make less; in reality, that doesn't happen. Profits aren't that high to begin with--e.g. Comcast's $86/month Internet service comes from a business with an 11% net profit margin, so they could drop the price to $77.60 and make $0 profit (assuming they drop the price of every product they offer evenly), and likewise would raise that price basis as they raise wages. CEO salaries are pretty low on a per-worker term, so much so that the top executives of Ford combined could forego all their salary and bonuses and get enough money to buy a latte for every Ford employee once each month.
What we're really talking about is raising wages and raising the price of products. GM could pay workers more and raise the price of cars. AT&T could pay workers more and raise the price of phone service. Then, we would either have less money to spend on other things and thus support fewer American jobs or we'd all move to T-Mobile where they didn't raise worker wages so we could pay less for service and complain about AT&T suddenly laying off 15,000 employees when 80% of their customer base moved to other providers.
Everyone really wants to imagine money comes from nowhere and businesses have infinite profits. The world isn't a video game where we suppose there are consumers and they have money; it's a complex system where money moves back and forth.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Kind of the same problem. It's all economizing: if you lose your job, you lose income and now you have to find work (effort). At the same time, instability is bad, and the threat to your own ability to hold a job is visceral and scary.
The thing is outsourcing (trade) and technical progress both immediately eliminate jobs at a point. You find a faster way to shear sheep, you only need 9 of every 10 sheep shearers; that last guy can go find somewhere new to work. Maybe that doesn't happen, and the drop in the price of wool causes 10% more wool purchases; or maybe something in-between happens, and only 1 in 20 workers goes away; or maybe the opposite happens, and wool becomes affordable enough that its superiority to cotton causes it to displace cotton, and now you hire 8 times the sheep shearers but the cotton industry has round after round of layoffs as nobody's buying anymore.
Trade and technical progress also reduce the actual cost of products, and leads to a reduction in price. That means your ability to buy your own clothes instead of making them or waiting for rich people to throw them out for scavenging when the new styles come in is contingent on generations of your forefathers losing their jobs repeatedly to less-labor-intensive processes. At a point, those processes turned the market around and made clothing a widely-purchased commodity, although that came when people could afford it by way of us not having to employ a lot of people per clothing article made--which, when you go from a 10%-population market to a 98%-population market, is still a lot of movement. Even then, the actual ability to purchase clothing means the same money wasn't spent on something else--either because that something else got cheaper or because people liked clothes better and stopped buying it.
From that market turn-around, you then only have the reduction of clothing-maker jobs. New tech to make clothes cheaper, but we don't buy more clothing (we buy video games instead); outsourcing to import clothing cheaply, and the manufacture jobs vanish (but we can buy other things). The shipping and retail worker jobs grew with each of these--more stuff bought, more shipped, more sold--although we economize that, too (wooden shipping pallets...).
I'm part of this system, too. My job can go away. I work with computers and do system administration and network security; I always look for ways to minimize the costs. Less labor, fewer analysts, easier administration. I moved this company from Linux with programs to Linux configured by Puppet, and now to Linux with Docker, and now performing my job takes literally 1/100 as long (I've replaced repeating processes that took 6 days with processes that take 5 minutes, seriously). I always argue for systems that do most of their analysis and tuning for us so we don't need to hire 15 analysts for 24-hour coverage--this is literally the difference between Snort with BASE and something like CISCO FirePower: one person can do IDS analysis with FirePower here, and it would literally take at least 15 analysts at $40k/year each (plus more administrative overhead) to stitch together a cheap, home-grown system. I'm not exempt.
I've torn out systems in the past and re-architected them with half as many components because the parts I wanted to remove were breaking. Near 100% of support calls for those systems went away, and several impacted departments down the line became more-productive. I'm removing over 90% of the systems I've ever supported because I've built new stuff that replaces it all. I've argued for new business processes, and am trying to develop a documentation process and procedure here--and document the processes used to deploy new systems, deploy new software, and maintain all this crap. It's all trivial, and it's getting more-trivial day by day.
Eventually they just won't need me. They might promote me to another position just to keep me. People have tried; I've had people try to hire me simply to have me on-hand for
Support my political activism on Patreon.
If they're calling for a strike, then it isn't something trivial.
Everyone is quick to judge them, yet have zero information about what the contract is offering or what the issues are.
I WORK for AT&T and this article on Slashdot is the first news I have heard on the matter. ( I fall under wireline vs wireless, though our contract is also up this year )
For those who have not worked for a Union company, let me brief you on a few things.
You cannot negotiate any part of your job with the company. Salary, benefits, time off, nothing. All of it is done from the Union.
Our last contract, the healthcare premium increase effectively erased the mediocre raise we got. ( ~1 - 1.5% a year )
The company no longer trains non-management employees ( I haven't seen any training for more than a decade ) for the equipment they're responsible for.
The newer folks are supposed to learn from the veteran techs. ( Who carry the job most of the time )
So you're effectively on your own to learn it. I am one of three people with a Cisco Cert ( my vacation time, my money to obtain it ) on my team and have full blown enable access to damn near every router and switch in the company. All the way up to the Core level systems.
Think about that for a moment. The vast majority of my team has the same level of access and exactly ZERO formal training on any of it and the company could give two shits about it.
Training, healthcare costs and a raise that isn't laughable are usually the big issues that Strikes are born from. It's not that the company can't afford it, they just take their workforce for granted and think all this stuff just magically works on its own somehow. :|
Oh and for those who think you can replace everyone with just anyone off the street at a lower wage, it typically takes at least two years ( a year for the ultra-motivated ) for an already qualified someone to become proficient enough at their work to do so without help. Unless, of course, you think these folks are just born with innate knowledge of how specialized telecom hardware works and integrates with the other systems.
If that were the case, the company would have replaced everyone a long time ago.
So don't judge those considering a strike too harshly just yet. At least until we know what their reasons are.