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The
AT&T customer support center in Portland officially
closes Jan. 18.
AT&T
informed Portland workers of the center closing Nov. 12.
Employees say they had just three weeks to decide whether
to move, and workers wanting jobs in Texas had to be there
by Jan. 3.
If AT&T
workers were to strike nationally, it probably wouldn't
occur until early spring.
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The race for dominance in cyberspace has made a lot of people
wealthy. But the Internet boom also has a downside. Just ask
Adam Kinsman. Kinsman's career with AT&T came to an abrupt
halt last week. After almost four years as a customer support
service agent, the North Portland resident was told that his
job was moving to Texas. With a baby due next month, he decided
not to follow it.
Kinsman is one of 86 local AT&T employees whose jobs
headed south. The move comes as the company continues to
slash costs in its traditional phone operations to pay for
its bold move into Internet service. The strategy has left
shareholders nervous, the union angry and some ex-employees
bitter. "The Portland office was really like a family,"
Kinsman says. "This closure is like a divorce."
Last fall, the business press was filled with ominous news
for AT&T employees. The company was struggling after
laying out $110 billion to gobble up cable networks--such
as TCI, Paragon and MediaOne--that were seen as future Internet
service providers. It had cut 20,000 jobs in 1998 to eliminate
$1.6 billion in annual costs, and in September 1999 Chairman
Michael Armstrong vowed to make another $2 billion cut by
the end of 2000.
In mid-November, AT&T informed the Communication Workers
of America Local 7901 that it would be closing its customer-interface
maintenance center located at 819 SW Oak St. This center,
one of several regional offices scattered across the country,
is responsible for testing phone lines and systems and dispatching
workers to fix any problems found. Thanks to technological
advances, this testing can now be done from any location.
A worker in Portland can monitor phone lines in Texas. Or,
as AT&T's Portland employees learned, a worker in Texas
can keep tabs on the Northwest.
AT&T spokeswoman Sarah Duisik says the company decided
to move its Portland operations south because the center
in Texas is bigger. However, Madelyn Elder, president of
the Portland CWA branch, has another theory. She thinks
technology has provided companies like AT&T with a perfect
union-busting technique. Elder notes that Texas, unlike
Oregon, is a "right-to-work" state, meaning there are less
worker protections and less governmental support for unions.
In addition, she notes, employees there will be working
with contract workers, who are not eligible for union representation.
"If you can just move the work anywhere, then you can move
it to where no one is organized," she says. "Then once they
are organized, you can just move it somewhere else to keep
the wages down. It's the electronic NAFTA."
Duisik denies that Texas' historic hostility toward organized
labor was a factor in the decision. "We've got to consolidate
to stay competitive. It's similar to what our competitors
are doing," she says. "We decided to consolidate the centers
and move the work to a larger center. As far as union busting
goes, certainly not. This was a business decision. That's
all it was."
Elder says only 50 of the 86 workers were given the option
to move to Texas. In the end, only 21 workers decided to
leave Portland. The rest, Elder says, are scrambling for
jobs. For his part, Kinsman hopes to work for another telephone
company in the future. He says his experience has left him
cynical about his former employer. "They close high-paying
offices and then open cheapies," he says. "Right now, they're
moving offices to Dallas with temp workers. What's next,
sweatshops in Taiwan?"
Nationally, the layoffs could come back to bite the company.
In December the CWA workers across the country authorized
the union to strike, partly in response to this kind of
closure. The union's board must now vote before going to
the National Labor Relations Board, which would first try
to negotiate a settlement between the company and the union.
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 12,
1999
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