AT&T Washington exec Jim Cicconi took to the blogosphere Friday to lament the news of the closing of seven T-Mobile call centers, and to point out that AT&T and T-Mobile had warned the FCC of that outcome, and that the outcome could have been avoided if the FCC and Justice had let the two companies get together.
T-Mobile announced Friday the "consolidation" of 24 call centers into 17 and the cutting of 1,900 jobs. The company also said it would "restructure and optimize operations in other parts of the business."
Pointing out that the closings meant the layoff thousands of workers, Cicconi said that "only a few months ago AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved. We also predicted that if the merger failed, T-Mobile would be forced into major layoffs."
He chastised the FCC for a lack of regulatory humility, and said that "rarely are a regulatory agency's predictive judgments proven so wrong so fast," referring the FCC's argument that rejecting the merger would save jobs. Decisions have consequences, he said, suggesting the consequence of the FCC's decision was those thousands of layoffs, communities "facing turmoil" and the centers shuttered. "The truth of who was right is sadly obvious," he said.
