Posted on 03/26/2008 6:41:43 PM PDT by RDTF
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.
"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.
So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.
Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some communities and among certain groups, the high school drop out rate is as high as 50 percent. The United States needed to make solving that problem a priority, he said.
"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.
Gone are the days, he said, when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Government school are geared for political indoctrination, not actual education.
Translation: Folks just won't work for $7.50 an hour and no benefits.
Perhaps they ought to look in other 'communities' among the other 'groups'. Or perhaps someone should just post the 'That's Racist' graphic.
May I suggest to AT&T that the U.S. Territories have a surplus of English speaking, moderately skilled, technology savvy, American labor pools...
But then again, I’m sure they considered the territories before they outsourced clear half way around the world.
I wonder which communities and groups he's talking about here. This really isn't a problem. Communities tend to be small areas. If you offer a good salary, people will come in droves from outside that community to work for you.
It’s tough to find them at AT&T fer sure......
didn’t they just lay off 8000 people last quarter? What jobs where those besides B2B sales execs? I thought I heard that CS lost a ton also? Anyone got the old article? It also talked about a bunch of store closures.
I don’t know many people who aspire to be customer service reps.
Exactly. There is never a problem filling any type of job. The problem is always expecting to find good employees by paying them minimum wage.
“Gone are the days, he said, when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally.”
And gone are the days where we had no choice but AT&T.
Works both ways bub!
I also considered that, but these may not be all call center positions, though they probably are. I used to work for Sprint, and they consider service techs(phone guys) to be customer service positions as well.
Thats funny. Perhaps if they trained and promoted from within and stopped farming out IT jobs they would not have the problem.
They want to pay top technicians 20 thou a year. Thats what they really want.
HR in most companies are so full of themselves, they couldn’t spot a good employee if the CEO applied themself.
I will comment on the criminal dishonesty and incompleteness of this dihonest %&^%$&^$%’s comments as soon as I calm down....
Maybe.
I used to work for AT&T. They laid off over 200,000 people before they got to me. They could try calling a few of them back but then they might have to pay them more than $5/hr.
I’m proud to say that after 10 or so years of getting telemarketing calls or customer service calls from overseas, I still refuse to talk to any of them. Even when they tell me with a heavy Indian accent that their names are Nancy or Bill.
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