Detroit - AT&T workers represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) kicked off a multi-state "Broken Promises Tour," calling attention to the impact of ongoing job losses and offshoring in communities across the Midwest. The tour begins today with a press conference and roundtable in Detroit, where AT&T workers will be joined by local labor leaders to call out AT&T for continuing to cut U.S. jobs in the wake of the GOP tax bill. 
 
 Before the Republican tax plan passed, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson pledged that if the tax cut passed, the company would spend at least $1 billion in capital expenditures and be able to create "7,000 good jobs for the middle class." Instead, despite $20 billion in tax savings, a new CWA analysis based on AT&T's Q2 earnings report estimates that the company has eliminated over 7,000 jobs since January 2018 when the tax cuts took effect. The company's latest quarterly earnings report reveals nearly $10 billion in profits in the first half of this year and indicates that AT&T is increasing its spending on share buybacks to the highest level since 2014. 
 
 Following today's events in Detroit, AT&T workers will make stops in Toledo, OH; Columbus, OH; Bloomington, IN; Kansas City, MO and other cities in the region that are experiencing the effects of AT&T's job cuts. At each stop, the workers will join with former AT&T employees whose jobs were eliminated and elected officials and community leaders who are taking a stand against AT&T's outsourcing and offshoring. They will also visit the district offices of members of Congress, sharing information about AT&T's job cuts and urging them to hold AT&T accountable. Along the way, workers will be gathering signatures on a petition urging the company to invest in jobs here in the U.S. 
 
 The workers will wrap up their trip in Dallas, TX, home to AT&T's headquarters, where they will deliver the petition and demand that the telecom giant make good on its promises to American workers. 
 
 "I worked at AT&T for 15 years, and I loved my job" said Kelly Clay, who was laid off in 2017, along with many of her coworkers, and is participating in the tour. "It's getting harder and harder to find good jobs. Many of us are struggling to make ends meet. AT&T makes big promises to American workers. But in places like Kansas City, they've broken those promises time and again." 
 
 The tour comes as CWA has launched radio ads across the Midwest and in Dallas highlighting how AT&T used its tax break to enrich executives rather than create jobs and raise wages for American workers. 
 
 "Big corporations like AT&T and those running for office need to know that working people in America won't be forgotten," said Jeremy Bain, who has worked at AT&T's call center in Saginaw, MI for 14 years and is participating in the tour. "Our families and communities have been left behind by companies like AT&T that line their pockets offshoring U.S. jobs and collecting big tax breaks. It's time for AT&T to invest in the workers and communities that have made the company successful." 
 
 A recent report from CWA found that AT&T has closed 44 call centers and eliminated 16,000 call center jobs in the last seven years. The Midwest has been particularly hard hit by closures and layoffs in recent years. 
 
 "In 2011, AT&T shuttered the call center I worked at for 11 years, despite our area manager's assurance that there was plenty of work to keep the center open," said Laheelah Hunter, who has worked at AT&T for almost 19 years and is joining the tour." I was lucky to find another job at AT&T here in Cleveland, but many of my co-workers uprooted lives and even divided their families to 'follow the work' to the Detroit center. And guess what? Now those families are being faced with more hard choices because AT&T has closed that center too. I'm joining the Broken Promises Tour to hold AT&T accountable. I don't want to continue to lose colleagues to layoffs or outsourcing from a multibillion dollar company that owes its success to its workers." 
 
 CWA has been leading the charge to hold AT&T and other corporations accountable to their tax bill promises by publicly challenging them to reveal their spending plans for the tax windfall. CWA and other major unions filed information requests at over five companies and took action against companies like AT&T over its broken tax bill promises. 
 
 CWA has also been at the forefront of efforts to ensure that elected officials are addressing the issues that matter to working families, driving critical conversations about jobs, the economy, and corporate accountability at the local, state, and federal level. Union members are channeling their anger into action at their workplaces, in the streets, and at the ballot box. 
 
 14,000 AT&T workers with CWA – including many in key midwestern swing states – are poised to strike if the company refuses to commit to protecting U.S. jobs. 
 
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 About CWA: The Communications Workers of America represents 700,000 working men and women in telecommunications, customer service, media, airlines, public service and manufacturing. ||||| Buy Photo Charles Daniels, president of Communications Workers of America Local 4123, kicks off the union's "Broken Promises Tour" on Monday at AT&T;'s call center on Michigan Avenue in Detroit. (Photo: Breana Noble, The Detroit News)Buy Photo 
 
 About two dozen communication workers on Monday stood outside an AT&T call center in Detroit to kick off a Midwest tour condemning the company for breaking its job creation “promises” — which AT&T says it never made. 
 
 “AT&T, do the right thing,” Communication Workers of America members chanted outside the Michigan Avenue office. 
 
 Dubbed the “Broken Promises Tour,” the bus tour is taking union members from Detroit to other cities including Toledo and Columbus on their way to the telecommunication company’s headquarters in Dallas, Texas. They say AT&T is failing to create 7,000 jobs it said it would when corporate tax cuts were implemented in Washington in December. A CWA analysis of the company’s second quarter said AT&T eliminated more than 7,000 jobs nationwide since January and has closed several call centers, including one in Detroit. 
 
 “We have not seen the jobs that were promised,” said Linda Hinton, vice president of CWA’s District 4, which includes Michigan. “We came to fight for that at the bargaining table.” 
 
 Last fall AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said if President Donald Trump signed corporate tax cuts into law, the company would invest $1 billion in capital projects. He said investments of that size create about 7,000 “hard hat” jobs to lay fiber optic cables. The company also gave $1,000 bonuses to more than 200,000 union-represented AT&T employees in the United States after the cuts took effect. 
 
 “For months, the CWA has been making inaccurate and misleading statements regarding a non-existent ‘promise’ around tax reform and jobs,” AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said in an email. “Contrary to inaccurate statements by the CWA, AT&T said nothing … promising that the company itself would create any number of jobs.” 
 
 Richter said the company has hired 8,000 in the U.S. this year and are hiring thousands more. He said 90 so far are in Michigan. 
 
 The CWA is in its fifth month of negotiations with AT&T for 14,000 members in the Midwest. The contract expired in April. Hinton said the union demands additional health-care benefits and wants AT&T to commit to maintaining its workers. Since 2015, she said, the union has lost about 1,500 members in Michigan. 
 
 AT&T closed a credit and collections call center at 105 E. Bethune in Detroit’s New Center in March. AT&T's Richter said nearly all of the 114 landline support workers had a job-offer guarantee after it closed and that half remain on the company's payroll. 
 
 CWA District 4 Representative Mike Schulte said that was not true. He said the company had 125 employees at the Bethune Street center. Of them, Schulte said 27 still are working there, 11 were relocated and more than 80 were laid off. 
 
 Anika Estes, 46, of Detroit is one of 27 employees still working at the Bethune Street location, as AT&T looks to find other jobs for them to fill. 
 
 "It has been nonstop; we've been busy, very, very busy," Estes said. “The calls are coming in so rapid that you can barely take a sip of water." 
 
 AT&T's Richter said the company is consolidating its workforce in areas where landline use is declining. He said the final offer to the union in May would provide 11 percent compounded wage increases over four years, a “continuation of job security provisions that are virtually unheard of in the U.S.,” and a commitment to hire 1,000 Midwest workers. 
 
 Hinton said the union does not want to see any more jobs lost. 
 
 “Members voted that the executive leadership could call a strike when and if we deem it necessary,” Hinton said. “For us, it’s about jobs and job security, but they’ve made no commitment.” 
 
 bnoble@detroitnews.com 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://detne.ws/2OMxCQD ||||| The communications giant is expecting a windfall of $20bn in savings from Trump’s tax reforms, but has closed 44 call centers since 2011 
 
 Cindy Liddick had worked at the AT&T call center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for 12 years before it closed earlier this month. 
 
 The former customer support specialist is among the more than 16,000 people in the United States who have lost their jobs at the communications giant since 2011, as it continues to shut down call centers to consolidate facilities within the US, or in favor of offshore alternatives in countries such as India, the Philippines and Mexico. 
 
 Though AT&T is earning record profits, spending billions on stock buybacks and is expecting an estimated windfall of $20bn in savings from Donald Trump’s tax reforms, it has continued to lay off workers and outsource jobs. 
 
 Republicans tout their massive tax cut – but is it a boost or a bust? | Gene Marks Read more 
 
 “My husband is very ill, I’m about to lose my health insurance and starting over in the job market at my age is going to be tough,” Liddick said. 
 
 In the last seven years, AT&T has closed 44 call centers, according to the Communications Workers of America labor union. Four closures, including the facility in Harrisburg took place this year. 
 
 While some workers are able to relocate to other call centers in the US, many are left jobless. For some, their jobs are sent offshore, where workers can be paid less than $2 an hour. 
 
 “My center closed in 2011. It was a shock to all of us. At the time we had an area manager telling us we had plenty of work to sustain our office,” said Laleelah Hunter, an AT&T call representative in Cleveland for 19 years. 
 
 Hunter was offered an option to stay and find a job elsewhere in the company in Cleveland, while most of her colleagues were laid off or given the option to relocate to Detroit, a two-hour drive away. 
 
 Liddick said only two employees out of nearly 100 workers accepted an offer from AT&T to relocate to Kentucky. She was not one of them. 
 
 “It’s hitting me really hard financially,” she said. “I could lose my house.” 
 
 An AT&T spokesperson said the lease on the Harrisburg center had expired, “and to increase efficiency we’re consolidating some call center work currently done in Harrisburg into our other US facilities.” 
 
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 In the first six months of 2018, AT&T reported nearly $10bn in profit as the company seeks to finalize an $85bn merger with Time Warner. AT&T has spent $16.45bn on stock buybacks since 2013, including $419m in the second quarter of 2018, the most its spent on buybacks since 2014. 
 
 “Offshoring call center jobs often saves money in the short term,” said Virginia Doellgast, Chair of International & Comparative Labor at Cornell University. “It is more difficult to calculate the longer-term costs of offshoring, but they can be significant.” 
 
 On the shoulders of all its employees, we've made the company extremely profitable Betsy LaFontaine, AT&T call center employee 
 
 Several AT&T employees explained they were hired with the impression their positions would provide the opportunity to begin a career with job security. 
 
 Betsy LaFontaine, who has worked at an AT&T call center in Appleton, Wisconsin, for 30 years as a service representative said that over the past decade, her call center was downsized from 500 employees to fewer than 30 today. 
 
 “They’re liquidating us,” said “This is not a poor company. On the shoulders of all its employees, we’ve made the company extremely profitable.” 
 
 In a December 2017 news release advocating in favor of Trump’s tax cuts, AT&T promised bonuses of $1,000 to 200,000 employees over the next year. The news release omitted that unions had already previously negotiated those bonuses with AT&T before the tax cut bill was passed. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on 22 December 2017. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 AT&T also claimed it would invest $1bn into the United States, noting that on average a $1bn investment in the telecom industry creates 7,000 jobs. AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, reportedly promised to create those 7,000 “hard hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year” with the $1bn investment in anticipation of the tax cuts. 
 
 Instead, AT&T has laid off an estimated 7,000 workers since that announcement was issued, according to the Communication Workers of America union. AT&T disputed this number, arguing they have hired 8,000 employees in the United States so far this year and 87,000 over the past three years. 
 
 US economy slowed in first quarter after Trump's $1.5tn tax cuts Read more 
 
 Job security for current AT&T employees is a highly contentious issue between AT&T and the CWA. 
 
 In April 2018, the CWA voted to authorize a strike for the 14,000 workers in the midwest and national workers in AT&T’s Legacy Unit as the union’s negotiations for contract renewals remain at a standstill. But a union spokesperson said no timeline or strike date has been set. 
 
 Unions also filed an unfair labor practice claim with the National Labor Relations Board against AT&T in May 2018 for the company failing to disclose its plans to use savings from the Trump tax cut plan to reinvest in its workforce. That claim is still pending. 
 
 “We’re on edge, not really knowing what’s going to happen to us in the next month or two,” said Hunter. “We don’t feel confident in what AT&T tells us about what lies ahead in our future.” 
 
 In a statement, AT&T said: “We’re proud to be one of the country’s largest union employers. And we continue to invest in good middle-class careers in areas where we’re seeing increasing customer demand for our products and services. Since 2011 … we’ve chosen to hire nearly 188,000 people in the US. 
 
 “At the same time, technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we must sometimes adjust our workforce in some of those areas. 
 
 “Most of our union-represented employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they are offered another job with the company if their current job is eliminated, and when that happens many wind up staying on our payroll.”
– Employees are calling out AT&T for what they say are lost jobs amid fat profits. Communication Workers of America members say AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson promised to spend at least $1 billion on capital projects that would create 7,000 jobs if the Republican tax plan passed, reports the Detroit News. However, a CWA analysis says the company has eliminated more than 7,000 jobs nationwide since January, when the plan went into effect. Four call centers closed this year, bringing the total over seven years to 44, the Guardian reports, noting much of the work is being outsourced to countries like India and Mexico, where workers can earn less than $2 an hour. At the same time, AT&T appears to be doing just fine. The company reported $10 billion in profit in the first six months of the year, per the Guardian, and spent $419 million on stock buybacks in the second quarter, bringing its total spent in that category to roughly $16.5 billion since 2013. "This is not a poor company," says an employee at a Wisconsin call center that she says is down to 30 employees from 500 a decade ago. "We've made the company extremely profitable" but "they're liquidating us." AT&T acknowledges "there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline." Claiming it continues to invest in middle-class careers, however, the company says it's hired 8,000 US workers this year, and 87,000 over three years.