AT&T CEO: We Offshore Because You're DumbAnd here we were thinking you were just saving a buck...
(
old news - 01:00PM Thursday Mar 27 2008)
tags: business · telco · Oddities · consumers · AT&T U-Verse · AT&T DSL ServiceTipped by Jon 
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson probably didn't make many friends today by stating the telecom giant was
having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the States from India. AT&T has so far only brought back 1,400 of those promised 5,000 jobs to the States, and blames the US education system (and apparently your crappy SAT scores) for his company's inability to
keep their promise.
Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent. "If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down," he said. "We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas....I know you don't like hearing that, but that's the way it is."
So to review: AT&T's offshoring is not because the company wants cheap labor, it's because you're a defective product. You folks in Austin are particularly incompetent, apparently, because you desire higher wages than what's paid in Bangalore.
While AT&T has made a lot of noise about bringing jobs back to the U.S. over the past few years, the workers themselves often
tell a different story. We haven't seen any unions freak out over Stephenson's comments yet, but there's sure to be some serious union blowback headed Randall's way.
