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AT&T job cuts even out
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December 30, 1996: 9:56 a.m. ET
Internet boom helps phone giant add as many jobs in 1996 as it cut
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) -- Assailed as a "killer" for its plan to lay off thousands of workers in 1996, AT&T Corp. will end the year with roughly the same number of employees it had at the beginning of the year.
AT&T said Monday that job cuts it made this year were balanced by job growth in the booming Internet, customer-service and local telephone service units. The company eliminated 7,700 positions as it stepped away from the communication-services and computer businesses, but added about the same number of jobs to the core operations, spokesman Jim Burns told CNNfn.
Burns said the company employed 127,700 workers at the end of September, down from 128,200 a year earlier.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that AT&T has not changed plans to eliminate 17,000 jobs over three years, in addition to reductions at AT&T spin-offs Lucent Technologies Inc. and NCR Corp. Lucent, the former AT&T phone-equipment unit, said last week that it has cut 16,000 jobs. Computer maker NCR, which will be spun off on Tuesday, recently completed 8,500 job cuts.
AT&T, which has cut more than 100,000 jobs in the last decade, attributed the high number of jobs it has created to changes in telecommunications law passed earlier this year by Congress. The new law allows long-distance and local telephone companies to compete in each other's markets.
The company was maligned earlier this year after announcing the planned job cuts. Newsweek labeled AT&T Chairman Robert E. Allen a "Corporate Killer" in a February article about downsizing. Other news organizations, prompted by public protests, added to the debate over whether greed was getting the best of America's blue-chip companies.
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