At&T; Staff Grab Chance For Early Out Booming Labor Market Means Many Can Profit From Quitting

IBM shook entire communities when it axed 150,000 jobs in the early 1990s. Kodak left its staff trembling about pink slips with plans last year to cut nearly 17,000 workers.

AT&T Corp., which is slashing up to 18,000 jobs over the next two years, is evoking a different sort of grumble.

The response from some Ma Bell managers: Take my job, please.

In a paradoxical result of AT&T’s attempt to mitigate the pain in this year’s biggest corporate job cut so far, dissent has emerged from managers AT&T is passing over for generous incentives intended to lure people into early retirement.

“Not only am I concerned, but I know other people are also in other departments,” said a 50-year-old computer-network manager in AT&T’s Global Solutions unit, who was told not to expect a buyout offer.

“If you want to lose all these people, why would you not offer it to everybody? There was a lot of griping and complaining about it,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity as did several other managers.

The nation’s largest telecommunications company says it is offering most of its managers - or about half its 128,000-employee staff - the opportunity to retire early with up to 20 percent more of their pensions than they’d normally be entitled.

The Basking Ridge, N.J.-based company figures that up to 11,000 managers will accept, and alleviate a need to lay off people as it tries to cut costs by $1.6 billion this year alone.

Most companies trimming their payrolls target certain areas for cuts over others in an effort to keep coveted employees.

But AT&T’s sprawling structure - a complex mix of growing and lackluster businesses ranging from long-distance phone to Internet service- has made it tougher to keep everyone satisfied. Worsening matters is a booming job market that has created unusual demand for many high-tech workers. Computer-network managers, for example, easily could get new work after essentially getting paid to leave AT&T.

“This can come and haunt you. It’s tough to offer it to certain segments of the company and then come back and say, ‘Hey, you guys are excluded from this,”’ said Bob Lee, an executive recruiter who heads up 19 Manpower Inc. offices in California.

The new incentives were announced Jan. 26, prompting media terms like “kindler and gentler” to describe the company’s generosity. In addition to pensions, retiring managers can get full health and insurance benefits if their age and years of service add up to 65, down from 75 under AT&T’s previous plan.

But the company has excluded its 14,000-worker wireless unit from the buyouts. And few of the 6,000 employees in the company’s Global Solutions unit will be allowed to participate because AT&T wants to expand that business.

“There can be an envy internally about people who left and got a nice retirement package, especially if they found themselves in a situation where they were better off” retiring, said Andris Zoltners, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s business management school in Chicago.