AT&T Cuts Collections Jobs

It looks like more job cuts are coming to the telecommunications industry in the near future. This time the job cuts are coming to the workers of AT&T. This time the workers of AT&T Mobility Services are going to take the hit in order to preserve the bottom line. They are getting ready to get rid of a number of the staffers in order to cut back on the amount that they need to pay for their staffers and the facility that they are currently maintaining.

The workers who are going to be displaced are, for the time being, employed by AT&T at the collections call center in the city of Portland, Oregon. That collections center, which brings in money from customers who have not been able to pay their bills on time will be closed up in order to cut back on the amount of staff that they have, and the associated costs of having the staff.  When the facility is closed later in the year there will be no need for the workers and they will be out of a job.

These cuts will impact about 86 workers when the facility is closed down. Those job cuts are enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the terms of the current federal law.  The official advance notice was filed with the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development. This kind of information gives the workers some extra time to prepare, when compared to simply being handed a pink slip and being told to pack up your desk right now. The idea that the short notice for this many workers can have a negative impact on the surrounding community.  The notice is designed to help the workers to find time to find more work before they end up on unemployment.

The extra time does, in theory, give the workers time to find other positions before they are out of a job. In the current economy however there is no guarantee that the jobs the soon to be displaced workers will need with materialize before the notification deadline. That deadline for the workers to be displaced is the 29^th of June. After that time if they have not found a job they will move off of the payroll and onto the unemployment rolls.

For the time being the company is not giving out much in the way of information about what they plan to do with the jobs. For the current moment we do not know if the company is planning to simply cut the jobs, if they are going to move some of the jobs to other facilities that will need to add more staff in order to move their call volume, or if they plan to outsource the calls to a third party call center in order to cut costs. For the time being it is likely that the company will simply divert its calls to the existing call centers to service customer calls without making any solid decisions about what to do with the jobs in the future.