I heard a chilling story recently. AT&T apparently notified a bunch of employees in Los Angeles that their jobs are being eliminated and that they need to report to other cities like Dallas or lose their job. Many of these employees were relocated to Los Angeles in the last five or six years, and the company paid for that past relocation. Employees now must move at their own expense. I was told the same thing was happening in other AT&T markets across the country. This is a particularly callous way to eliminate employees, and AT&T is clearly trying to induce employees to resign to avoid paying severance. This is not the kind of behavior that would normally be expected from a large corporation. It certainly tells the remaining employees of the company that they are not valued.

There is rarely a month that doesn’t go by without hearing that one of the big telcos is laying off a group of employees somewhere. The story piqued my interest, and it took only a little research to see that telcos have steadily been eliminating staff while the biggest cable companies have not.

Consider the following chart that shows employment at the biggest ISPs and carriers since 2018.

It’s not easy to make sense of the staffing changes at the various carriers. Consider some of the big trends at each company since 2018.

Some of the staff reductions at AT&T can be justified since the company suffered from several disastrous investments. The biggest was buying Time Warner Media and spinning it off just three years later to Discovery with a huge loss. The company had another big failure from its purchase of DirectTV. While AT&T flourished from 2018 to 2023 in adding cellular customers, competition dropped the average revenue per customer over that time period. AT&T lost only 3% of its net broadband customers over that period while it has been transitioning from copper to fiber.

Verizon has a similar story of making bad investments in AOL and Yahoo. Due to the big surge of FWA cellular broadband and good sales in FiOS, Verizon has 54% more broadband customers today than it had in 2018. Verizon also thrived and grew cellular customers during this period.

Everybody has likely heard Lumen’s story. The company has struggled since it was spun off from AT&T as US West. The company divested it’s copper assets in twenty states and recently announced more layoffs.

T-Mobile is an interesting case. Cellular customer additions have been sluggish since it merged with Sprint. It recently added 4.8 million FWA broadband customers. The layoffs at T-Mobile seem to be clearly aimed at improving the bottom line – even though one of the big promises made to employees with the Sprint merger was that it would create new jobs, not lose jobs.

Comcast has thrived in everything except cable TV. Since 2018, the company added 5 million broadband customers and 6.5 million cellular customers.

Charter also did well except with cable TV. Charter added 5.3 million broadband customers since 2018 and 7.8 million cellular customers.

The bottom line of my quick analysis is that telcos have been reducing staff at a much greater pace than can be justified by looking at the overall trends of each business. I have to wonder how Comcast and Charter are going to react to the sudden slump in broadband growth? Will they now start shedding employees like the telcos have done?