New York, NY – While AT&T continues its plans to layoff CWA members the union, Communications
Workers of America, is taking the company to court. AT&T is subcontracting jobs and hiring workers overseas. AT&T publicly announced holiday bonuses while quietly laying off a large number of employees. The pattern of American companies moving jobs to foreign countries is now at crisis proportion. “This is an action brought by a labor union… against an employer over the employer instituting an unprecedented massive layoff of employees represented by the union while at the same time massively subcontracting work that the employees are trained and qualified to perform, for the bad faith purpose of diminishing the employee bargaining unit for which the union serves as exclusive representative in willful, bad faith breach of a contractual promise to deal with the union with respect, fairness, and good faith,” CWA wrote in the lawsuit.
CWA also claims in the law suit that AT&T is intentionally trying to reduce the union’s bargaining power with the layoffs.
“So far, AT&T has put forward a proposal to cut thousands of work hours from employees’ schedules, while continuing to contract out work and send good jobs overseas,” a CWA statement said. “The contracting out of this work and AT&T’s offshoring of good jobs is the real issue. AT&T must stop hiring contractors to do the same work that employees are qualified and trained to do.”
