Amdocs / AT&T Managed Services lay offs in Feb. 09

[Laid Off]

Would like to share what Amdocs has recently done to approximately 300 employees located in the USA states of California, Texas, Missouri, Illinois and New Jersey. As you may know, there have been several outsourced arrangements between SBC / AT&T and Amdocs over the past several years. The most recent outsource took place on February 25, 2008. This outsource involved 100's of legacy SBC and legacy AT&T workers. If an AT&T employee didn't accept the Amdocs outsource offer, the AT&T employee was forced to resign without any severance benefit regardless of how many years of AT&T service. Amdocs was presented to the AT&T workers as a good and reasonable company and over the past year Amdocs was a fair employer and received a great deal of money from AT&T under the 7-year contract signed with AT&T in Feb. 09. Unfortunately, Amdocs probably shouldn't be viewed as such a good place anymore and here’s why. These 300 or so employees were notified on Feb. 9th, 2009 their positions were identified as part of a work force reduction due to the current economic crisis and their last work day was Feb. 26, 2009 exactly one year plus one day after the outsource. By doing this, many of the 300 or so employees are receiving substantially less severance benefits. For example, 12 weeks pay versus 26 and up to 52 weeks. Amdocs could have easily laid off these workers on Feb. 25, 2009 without any additional negative impact to the overall AT&T Managed Services Portfolios. Amdocs intentionally selected one year plus one day to avoid the additional severance payout. These additional severance monies wouldn’t have been a drain to the Amdocs balance sheet given what Dov Baharav, President and Chief Executive Officer, told the entire AT&T Managed Services workers in a town hall meeting in early Feb. 09 – Amdocs has approximately 1.2 or 1.3 US million dollars on hand in cash. Affected workers should speak out and the story should be told to the media and the legal community. It would not surprise me back in Feb. 08, AT&T and Amdocs planned this so that both companies would benefit -- AT&T avoided paying severance all together and Amdocs paid less – a win win for the companies and a loss loss for an AT&T worker. I realize this is a lengthy post but I did want to share the facts. Hope folks find this post and reply.

[Roger Doger]

Amdocs suck really bad as an employer. Just ask the staff here who have lost their jobs supporting DirecTV billing and DirecTV information systems.

Jobs are moving to India for the sole purpose of saving employment costs. Workers in India are far, far cheaper, have no health care costs and are easier to force to work longer days. Indians are highly educated too.

This is not part of the recession, Amdocs is punishing American workers for being successful by moving their jobs and work to India in order to cut costs. DirecTV are not benefiting from lower costs, but they are losing a level of quality assurance in addition too 15+ years business knowledge of a long time, trusted vendor.

In my eight years experience with Amdocs, once projects are successful or purchased from a third party (XACCT for example) everything moves to BRAZIL or INDIA.

They spend millions to save $10,000 dollars per employee and rip-off of loyal customers. Plus, as pointed out above, they severance package is a very insulting one-week per year to a maximum of 10.

Amdocs are another so called 'American' company,(they report earnings in dollar, over $700 million) taking US tax breaks and customers but they lay-off workers eroding the US tax base and adding to the welfare burden. They care nothing for there staff but they dollars they can earn or the dollars they can save move their job off-shore.

[Been There]

Been there - was packaged off in 2005 in Canada. Amdocs bought a large piece of a large Canadian Company and approx. 750 employess with it. ALL of them except for maybe 1 person is now gone. I did receive a good package however so it wasn't too bad and since they were so vile to work for I was happy to go. However if your company or a piece of your company has been bought by this money-grubbing company - start looking for a job now or make sure you can leave with the severance you deserve.