[miaht82]

Well in March, a good excuse was set-up.
"AT&T says it can't find skilled workers
Posted Mar 27 2008, 03:58 PM by Kim Peterson Rating: Filed under: AT&T, Kim Peterson
AT&T pledged in 2006 to bring back 5,000 customer service jobs to the U.S. from India, eliminating its low-wage foreign call centers. But CEO Randall Stephenson said this week he can't find enough skilled workers to fill the jobs.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio. So far, only 1,400 jobs have been successfully brought back here.

Stephenson gave an especially candid speech, deploring the fact that the high school dropout rate is as high as 50% in some cities.


"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. Ouch. He added that his company can do work in Bangalore, India, just as easily as it could in the U.S.

"I know you don't like hearing that, but that's the way it is," he said.

Perhaps Stephenson should consider this: AT&T is only paying a $30,000 annual salary for those jobs. Raise the salary, and you might just find those skilled workers."

I guess he tried to make it sound that we should be thankful for the jobs that are here.

"Being headquartered in Dallas will benefit our long-term growth prospects and human resources needs, and our ability to operate more efficiently, better serve customers and expand the business in the future.”

AT&T will also benefit from the concentration of telecommunications engineers and experts and the cluster of tech firms based in the so-called Telecom Corridor area in Richardson.

AT&T is the most recent big telecom firm to bring its headquarters to the Dallas area."
They said the move was to better their human resource needs; if somebody wanted to work for AT&T that bad, wouldn't they pay a $70 flight from Dallas to SA to interview here? It's not like their asking people to connect twice to get to S.A.