AT&T promised 7k new jobs to get tax break, cut 23k jobs instead
The main issue here is that AT&T employs a large workforce that is not relevant to the current (Fiber) and upcoming (5G Cellular/WISP) service technologies being rolled out en masse.Which means as their legacy business units are retired or pulled back, they are letting go numerous employees while simultaneously hiring a slightly smaller number of more educated (up-to-date) workers to staff up their new business units.What we are seeing here is the decline of a historically booming industry (linemen) as the overhead required to maintain these networks becomes more specialized in nature and involves fewer people than before.Now, the ethical strategy to mitigate impacting their historically loyal workforce would be to re-train the copper linemen to work with the new technologies.The problem with this is that its' expensive. Insanely expensive. The training is made available to many of their current workers, in as many areas as possible (where the skills will be relevant) however at the end of the day an individual 'first-line' manager will not advocate for 64 year old Joe Schmoe with average performance stats to get this expensive  training if 24 year old Billy Bob with a 'young man's' performance record is also asking to get trained.