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Hundreds of AT&T Wireless Workers and Supporters Plan To Protest at iPhone 8 Launch at Apple HQ
Hundreds of AT&T wireless workers and members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) will protest outside the launch of the iPhone 8 at Apple HQ on Tuesday, we were told. "Marking the start of a critical sales period that's expected to bring in billions for the telecom giant, workers are calling out AT&T's pay cuts for its retail employees and the company's rampant outsourcing and offshoring that undermine their job security and ability to provide quality customer service," the Communications Workers of America said in a press statement. Over the years, AT&T has increasingly handed over the operations of its retail operations to third-party dealers that now represent over 60 percent of all AT&T branded stores. On top of this, AT&T retail employees allege that they are seeing their pay decline by thousands of dollars because the company manipulates their commission structure.
You can get an AT&T phone cheaper at virtually every store other than a AT&T retail store. Best Buy, Target, Costco all have sales. AT&T wants you to have Direct TV for virtually any promotion at a AT&T retail store.
Making the new iphone models in a big giant factory is the American dream! - Trump promised jobs coming back and so they will be good sirs!!
AT&T is being stupid - unlike public-employee unions, real trade unions such as CWA do some real good.
Every CWA union member who I've seen work on something is GOOD, unlike the clowns Cox/Infinity bring in.
Guess who gets work done cheaper in the long term? Cox/Infinity with their clowns, or AT&T with its CWA professionals?
Is the MOST EXPENSIVE way to do it. Oh, but I only pay x per month...Yeah, and over that time, you pay MORE for the phone if you paid in full. A lot of consumers, still think that you have to buy your phone from a carrier store. Walk into one and you'd think you walked into an Apple store, with a bit of Samsung also. They PUSH the apple phone because apparently that make more profit on it, and I'll be Apple gives them a deal on the phone.
What has happened to people today. Have brains been left by the wayside?
Maybe Apple should do them a favor and not let AT&T sell them....
n/t
Go forth and multiply there you ungrateful bastards!
Marking the start of a critical sales period that's expected to bring in billions for the telecom giant, workers are calling out AT&T's pay cuts for its retail employees and the company's rampant outsourcing and offshoring that undermine their job security and ability to provide quality customer service,
They do know who they're working for, right? AT&T is worse than Comcast when it comes to customer service.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Get a job babysitting robots or driverless Uber instead. Demand that the companies pay you at universal robot displacement wage so you can sit in a driverless taxi as it ferries people around town.
So, AT&T employees are protesting AT&T's business practices. Nothing they're protesting has anything to do with the iPhone 8 or Apple at large. Nonetheless, they're protesting at the launch of the new iPhone, simply because they know that places like Slashdot can't resist posting clickbait articles that mention Apple in the headline, thus bringing attention to their cause, despite the fact that nothing they're doing has anything to do with Apple.
Even worse, it looks like Slashdot is "breaking" this news, since I don't see a link or article mentioned anywhere, so that means that Slashdot is solely responsible for authoring the headline. Shame on you.
...calling out AT&T's pay cuts for its retail employees and the company's rampant outsourcing and offshoring that undermine their job security and ability to provide quality customer service,...."
When I call, I get Americans and they treat me like shit or an idiot. Like when on AT&T Customer No-Service insisted I had fiber into my house when I was looking that the orange and blue insulated copper in front of me.
Instead of protesting, stay on your jobs and do everything and anything you can do that helps the customer - even if it means bending the rules a bit; not enough to get fired; but enough so that your boss' boss' boss scratches his head when he sees whatever dumbass metrics they use for worker productivity and profitability.
See, today's America is very hostile to unions and workers' rights because of the rampant propaganda from right-wing media like Fox News. Stick it to the Man by working for the Man and playing by His rules -and bending them a bit.
Then go work somewhere else, losers. This is America. You have a choice.
The days of commissioned sales for phones making sense is gone. iPhones sell themselves. The only questions are how many lines do you need for your kids and spouse and what handsets do you want. No decision that needs guidance.
Hell. I do it online. Just FedEx the phone to me and don't make me recite my account number to a retail clerk.
Quit whining, you bunch of babies! There is more than one capitalist free marketplace in this country, you know. Sure, the most popular is the retail market for products and services that most people refer to when they make arguments for or against capitalism.
However, there exists several others and one of those is the labor market. You are completely free to work for whatever company will agree to hire you. If a company like AT&T treats you poorly then QUIT! Go work for another company that pays you better and treats you well!
Organizing protests and behaving like SJWs will not solve your problem. Once AT&T starts losing money because they don't have enough employees to keep their business running, they will be forced to treat their employees better. However, if you DON'T quit and hit AT&T in its pocketbook, then YOU are to blame because you're endorsing the way they treat you.
Again, quit whining to social media sites and MAKE THE CHANGE!
Or they could, you know... protest the company that is wronging them....
Thus completing the circle of self-interested hypocrisy.
The CWA wants the AT&T from a previous era back, and in some respects I would be behind that too. Companies' power to offshore, outsource and basically get rid of any group that isn't 100% profit-generating is a lot of what contributes to middle class instability.
I'm barely old enough to remember when "old" AT&T and the RBOCs existed...I was 10 when they were ordered de-monopolized. But from what I've heard from people alive previously, getting a job with one of these companies was a guaranteed ticket to lifetime stability. In addition, engineering was actually done correctly because there wasn't constant pressure to squeeze every single cost out of the system. I know everyone's going to say monopolies are bad, but they do provide the most stable class of jobs. Maybe monopolies are bad, but the alternative of a ton of cut-throat competitors isn't good for society either. In the model we have, public companies (and private ones controlled by hedge funds) are forced to implement whatever cost-saving trick is in vogue every quarter to make the numbers. A lot of these tricks, like spinning off "expensive" employees into a separate company to reduce benefits, offshoring to a service provider to hide expenses on a different balance sheet line, or constantly squeezing workers to get the tiniest drop of productivity out of them are detrimental to employment in general. Verizon did similar things as well, when they spun out Verizon Wireless. VZW workers get way fewer benefits than the CWA workers in Verizon proper.
I just wish people would get it out of their heads that unions are bad. Especially in the face of automation and offshoring, they're basically the only chance an employee has against their employer. Employers have spent decades convincing employees that they have their best interests in mind and that we're all friends. I think there needs to be a more adversarial labor/management relationship put back into the mix to swing the pendulum back toward the middle more. There's a big difference between "we can't fire you for any reason" demands and standing up when management says "we're moving 20,000 engineering positions to India effective immediately so that I can buy another mansion, and by the way we're still friends, right?"
Explain to me how this would be any more justified or sensible if we replaced the words "retail employees" with:
- telephone switchboard operators
- ISDN engineers
- elevator operators
- horse and buggy whip factory workers
?
Industries change, and labor changes with it. And each side gets as much as they can bargain for. What more do you want?
A woman comes across a man crawling under a street lamp. "I've lost my car keys," he explains.
The woman tries to help the man find his keys. After a few minutes of searching, she asks "Where exactly did you drop them?"
"Down the street, next to my car."
Puzzled, she asks "Then why aren't you looking over there?"
"The light is better here."
The Apple HQ (still at Infinite Loop Rd) is not where the event is being held (which is the new Apple Park spaceship campus). Are AT&T union employees they using the wrong mapping service on their iPhones?
I can completely understand why AT&T is outsourcing the jobs. Their employee's are fuckin idiots.
The iPhone 8 is responsible for this, how...?
I want every human to live in a solar powered mansion. Only robots can make this happen. Instead of.preserving retail jobs why don't we teach people how to direct and supervise the robots and logistics require to build everyone a mansion ?
fucking morons.
1. Apple launch = big event and lots of press
2. Protesting instead of working during Apple launch = big hit to AT&T sales & stores & brand
3. ??????
4. Profit!
OBVIOUSLY this isn't ment to hurt Apple -- but clearly will, perhaps even that added pressure will work in the workers favor. It's not like there are very many choices when you have these companies making sometimes BILLIONS per month at the expense of all the people doing the work...
Protest! I am Snowflake! Hear me ROOOOAAARRR!
It would help Trump politically to show up at this rally. The offshoring issue is a "pro-worker" issue that is less divisive than his usual activities. Sure, it ticks off the plutocrats, but they don't vote. Note in general I am NOT a Trump supporter, but believe focusing on "working-class" issues instead of ethnicity and gender would give him more traction.
Table-ized A.I.
He has little insight or even concern about appealing to a broader variety of voters. Election turnout is so low, coupled with our election system (gerrymandered districts and the electoral college), that relatively small groups of extremists can swing an election. The few issues he does take a genuine personal interest in are almost invariably opposed to the interests of workers. I don't doubt the propaganda machine will continue to fool tons of them, but I do hope that as the failures continue to be writ large, turnout will increase, meaning a better ratio of reasonable people to extremists at the polls.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Okay, I'll explain the fallacy of your own dead horse for you: right now, the buggy whip manufacturer (AT&T) is enjoying historical profits while at the same time demanding the people who generates said profits work for less money.
About 10 years ago, I worked at an AT&T store and made over $60,000 per year. It was a good job, and if you could show people the benefit of a wireless phone, it was easy money. As time passed, market penetration increased rapidly. It became more difficult to sell phones to "new customers". It became more common to see kids at 10, 9, 8, or 5 years old already have a phone. Fast forward, and it wasn't too long before nearly everyone had a cellphone with a data plan.
Back then, AT&T needed a strong sales force to penetrate the market. They needed to sell cell phones and data plans to customers that had not yet owned one. As market penetration approached 100% all that AT&T (and other carriers) were doing to changing out somebody's data phone for another data phone. It became rare to sell a phone to a "new customer" and it became rare to sell a data plan to a former dump-phone user because they didn't exist anymore. As the market reached saturation, sales commission levels dropped correspondingly. Now that everyone already has a phone with data, the carriers don't need or want corporate stores.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!... twice.....three times!