Stankey is notoriously enthusiastic about cutting jobs in the way Apple CEO Tim Cook is about squeezing Chinese suppliers on costs. Back in 2015, before Stankey was boss, AT&T employed a grand total of 281,000 people, according to its annual report filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And this was before its $85 billion move for Time Warner, one of the worst deals of the century. After offloading that business, AT&T finished March this year with 157,800 employees.
In other words, it has cut 123,650 jobs, or 44% of its workforce, in about seven years. This is only 5,717 fewer jobs than BT, Deutsche Telekom (excluding employees at its US division), Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Vodafone have cut in total over the same period. And AT&T is not some unique US case. Verizon, the other one of the big three US telcos, has removed 60,600 positions since 2015, equal to roughly a third of its workforce at the end of that year.