AT&T Calls Telecommuters Back To the Cubicle

bednarz writes "AT&T is requiring thousands of employees who work from their homes to return to traditional office environments, sources say. 'It is a serious effort to reel in the telework people,' says the Telework Coalition's Chuck Wilsker, who has heard that as many as 10,000 or 12,000 full-time teleworkers may be affected. One AT&T employee says rumors have been circulating since AT&T's merger with SBC that the new upper management is not supportive of teleworking: 'We'd heard rumors to that effect, and all of a sudden we got marching orders to go back to an office.'"

Re:eating your own dogfood?

[FinanceGeek]

I spent some time at AT&T and found management to be quite shortsighted - this move doesn't surprise me a bit.

Re:I hope they all quit!

[protolith]

Sniff, Sniff, I think you just stepped in some sarcasm, I guess you can't smell it....

Re:Better than telecommuting.

[gstoddart]

i have an even better idea: transporters.

Not to belabor this point too much ... but the holodeck is a specific application of transporter technology. In order to have a holodeck in the same sense as Trek, you need transporter technology -- that's how it works.

Cheers

Re:Personally...

[nahdude812]

Thats the average price most pepole pay outside the US, so get used to it and may concider[sic] using your feet/cycle a bit more.

I would if in the US, when living outside of cities, a job that is considered close to home was not 20 miles (32km) away.

I drive 44 miles round trip to my job, and I watched for a job that close to home for 3 years while driving 150 miles round trip. It's either that or move closer to my job and pay twice as much for housing (so far driving the distance and paying for the gas is the more economic alternative) or else move into a high crime neighborhood.

I get the sense that many Europeans don't really grok the scale out here, or more specifically the population density (or lack thereof). The US is something like 2.5x the size of the entire EU, while the EU has like 1.5x the population of the US. You just have way more jobs per square kilometer, and mass transit is a lot more viable for you (there are more routes per capita because of the higher population density). I could take a bus to work, but I'd have drive to the bus stop, and on the other end, I'd have to have a car waiting for me so I could drive the remaining distance. Bus travel time would be 2x-3x as long because it isn't a direct route, and goes some other places I'm not interested in and are out of my way first. Though on nice days I suppose I could carry a bike onto the bus with me.

I guess I'm just lazy, and would rather not spend 4 hours a day commuting to and from work.

Also, at this time of year it's dark when I get to work, and dark when I leave work, so riding a bike is incredibly unsafe (there's not sidewalks unless you're in the city, and I'm not).

2 words ...

[trolltalk.com]

Constructive Dismissal. [wikipedia.org]

"Examples of actions potentially justifying resignation

• Unilaterally changing the employees job content or terms of employment.
• Significantly changing the employees job location at short notice.

Sounds about right to me.

Re:Shadow Layoff?

[Stamen]

Get a new job. I'm not even kidding. The reason companies can treat employees bad, is because employees refuse to hold them responsible. If good employees regularly left bad employers, as they should, the good employers would thrive, and the bad employers would die. A free market only works if people make use of it.

Re:Shadow Layoff?

[jc42]

So much for AT&T sabotaging their whole "communications can save your business money" angle. Morons.

It might be noted that AT&T's management has a rather long history of failure to understand or cooperate with the integration of telecom with computers.

The poster child for this claim is the fact that unix was developed at Bell Labs, which of course was AT&T's main research division. But even when unix was adopted wholeheartedly by most academic researchers and lots of small companies, AT&T never saw it as a worthwhile product. They were one of the last companies to market a unix computer, and theirs flopped, mostly because its only telecom was modems and the phone system. They completely ignored the Internet, despite the fact that AT&T supplied most of the Internet's original long lines. They eventually abandoned any attempt to market their computers, and sold off the rights to unix, at a time when everyone except Microsoft and Apple had pretty much switched to unix (and there were rumors that Apple was planning to do the same).

As the Internet exploded in the 1990s, AT&T and its children pretty much refused to see it as an investment opportunity. They still view it as something good only for short-term profit, and steadfastly refuse to cooperate with the growing socialization of the Internet as our universal comm system. Just try getting permission to run your own server if your ISP is AT&T or any of the Baby Bells. This story is merely a part of that recalcitrance and obstructionism.

AT&T is stuck in 1927, and is being dragged into the 21st (or late 20th) Century kicking and screaming. A few of their marketers may see the future, but their management doesn't believe it at all.

Not that their offspring such as Verizon are much better.