He said it is in the midst of contract negotiations with some of its employees now. While those discussions will likely land within the parameters of its plan, Stankey added “I’m not happy about the fact that wages are rising as fast as they are.”
“There’s no question there’s wage inflation in the environment and quite frankly at 7% inflation there’s no question there’s pressures across a broad segment of goods and services. And we’re not insulated from that,” he said. “As you look at other parts of our business where people deploy long-life infrastructure like fiber networks, wages are a portion of that deployment cost…they are capitalized and taken over the life of a product that stays in service for many, many, many years. So, while obviously we’d like to pay less in wages, it’s not the end of the world when we’re seeing a little bit of an uptick” since those costs can be recovered over the product’s lifetime.
https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/att-chief-says-hes-not-happy-about-how-fast-wages-are-rising