Unionized AT&T Workers Blast Labor's Continued Decision to Not Provide Trade Adjustment Aid

The Labor Department's decision to continue to find that a unionized group of former AT&T call center employees are not entitled to trade adjustment assistance for outsourced jobs gives a "half-baked analysis" of the situation, the workers said in a Sept. 20 filing at the Court of International Trade. The plaintiffs accused the agency of failing to ever fully grapple with contradicting evidence on the record in its remand results (Communications Workers of America Local 4123, on behalf of Former Employees of AT&T Services, Inc. v. United States Secretary of Labor, CIT #20-00075).

In May, the court remanded the case to the agency after Judge M. Miller Baker found that Labor failed to discuss or even reference the union's evidence of why the trade adjustment case was warranted in its determination (see 2105040032). In the ignored evidence, former call center employees from Kalamazoo, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Appleton, Wisconsin gave evidence that the call center jobs were relocated to Mexico and Jamaica. Hope Kinglock, a certifying officer with Labor's Office of Trade Adjustment Assistance, looked at the evidence and continued to hold on remand that the employees were not entitled to the aid (see 2107230031).

"Labor acknowledges that detracting evidence exists, but it never actually grapples with it or explains why it deserves less weight," the union workers said in their brief. "Labor provides one conclusion after another that fails to tell the Court why, as a matter of logic, it reached the conclusion that it did. The Court therefore has no choice but to remand anew."

The union workers said that Labor spent the bulk of its remand "merely summarizing the competing record evidence" then simply restating its decision to favor the evidence given by AT&T. Labor thereby failed to identify the basis of its decision "with such clarity as to be understandable," the brief said.