AT&T Keeps On Firing Employees Despite Claims The Trump Tax Cut Would Boost Job Growth

It seems like only yesterday that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was promising on live TV that if Trump followed through on his tax cuts, the company would dramatically boost investment, in the process creating thousands of new jobs. Not "entry-level jobs," mind you, but at least "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in the ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year." Each $1 billion in new investment, AT&T insisted, would result in 7,000 such jobs. "Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages," Stephenson said.

We've pointed out several times how these promises meant absolutely nothing, but AT&T itself keeps driving the point home.

AT&T's earnings released last week showed that the company has eliminated 37,818 jobs since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) (which dropped AT&T's overall tax rate to 21% providing the company an estimated $46 billion in savings) was cheerily passed by Congress just three or so years ago:

"The Communications Workers of America, the telecom sector's biggest union, says AT&T's promised jobs never arrived either. Union officials today complained that AT&T earnings show the company has laid off 37,818 employees worldwide since the tax cut was passed in 2018, with 4,040 pink slips sent out to employees worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone."

Again that promised network investment never occurred either. AT&T's fourth quarter CAPEX was the lowest in a decade, and this year AT&T's expected to trim its overall investment somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion. The money? It went into executive pockets, investor pockets, and the company's massive debt load created by mindless merger mania.

We've noted a few times that making outlandish promises, grabbing billions in government favors (merger approval, tax breaks, regulatory help, whatever), then delivering jack shit is something AT&T and other telecom giants have been doing for the better part of a generation without no penalty whatsoever. None.

The same promises were made by AT&T and its primary lobbying arm (US Telecom) ahead of the net neutrality repeal. There too, AT&T promised job growth and massive new investment into broadband networks in exchange for the FCC basically self immolating its consumer protection authority. But when it came time to collect on said promises, as usual, they were nowhere to be found. The same head fake bait and switch also occurred ahead of AT&T's merger with Time Warner, which was also supposed to deliver investment, competition, and "synergies" that AT&T's earnings report shows never actually arrived.

Despite the evidence here being indisputable, somehow we never learn our lesson, and AT&T never faces any meaningful penalty. Worse, the folks that often pride themselves on standing up to government spending (like grumbling about some small town deciding to build its own broadband network) are routinely nowhere to be found when it comes time to discuss what's arguably one of the biggest, long running cons in American history.