All in the charts: Analyzing telecom's big workforce shrinkage

• Fierce compiled and analyzed the employee, revenue and profit figures for eight operators
• There didn’t appear to be a direct link between the financial metrics and employee count
• Analysts told Fierce AI, automation and restructuring have had more of an impact on the telecom workforce

The telecom workforce is – and has been – in flux. Beyond just layoffs, return-to-office mandates and restructurings have resulted in a large number of comings and goings (let’s be real, it’s mostly the latter). But we wanted to know if the ebb and flow follows a traceable pattern. 

So, we went digging around in operators’ earnings reports and regulatory filings to see if there was any correlation between changes in the size of a company’s workforce and reported metrics like revenue and profit. 

Here's what we found. 

The telecom workforce is shrinking

Fierce’s analysis of employee figures for eight of the largest wireless and wireline operators in the U.S. found the number of workers at each shrank nearly across the board from 2023 to 2024, with two exceptions (Altice USA and T-Mobile). 

AT&T shed the most employees, with nearly 9,000 gone year over year. Charter cut 6,600, Verizon 5,800 and Comcast 4,000, while Frontier lost only a few hundred over the same period. 

Zooming out to the longer-term picture, the overall employee total across these eight companies dropped from 766,300 in 2019 to 624,690 at the end of 2024. The most dramatic downward trends were seen at AT&T and Verizon, which saw their workforces shrink by 106,810 and 35,400, respectively from the end of 2019 to the end of 2024. AT&T notably went from a high of 247,800 workers at the end of 2019 to 140,990 at the end of 2024. 

Comcast, meanwhile, slashed its workforce dramatically in 2020, ending the year with 22,000 fewer workers than in 2019. However, it seemed to make up much of that gap in 2021. Overall, it was down just 8,000 workers at the end of 2024 compared to 2019. 

Are earnings to blame for employee cuts? 

Interestingly, it was hard to draw a clear line between annual revenue and workforce shrinkage. For five of the eight companies revenue has actually increased over the studied timeframe. The remaining three – AT&T, Altice USA and Frontier (which went through bankruptcy during the period in question) – saw revenue slide over the same period. 

The correlation between worker numbers and net income was even more murky. Take AT&T, for instance. While the chart below fluctuates wildly between loss and profit, the workforce figures above decline steadily. Ditto the comparison for Frontier. 

AvidThink founder Roy Chua told Fierce that it's true there's no "easy direct correlation" between employee counts and metrics like revenue and profit. That's in part because each telco is slightly different and things like CapEx, OpEx, R&D spend and worker efficiency matter too. 

What's driving workforce reductions?

So, if financial metrics aren’t the driving force behind workforce shrinkage, what is? One word: Efficiency.

Chua said headcount as part of OpEx is a natural place where operators look to cut costs and drive profitability. But there's more to the picture.

MoffettNathanson Managing Director Nick Del Deo told Fierce that over the long term, workforce declines can be attributed to everything from revenue and profit pressure, technological improvements (cough-automation-cough), better network reliability (which lowers the need for repairmen), shifts toward digital vs in-store distribution and outsourcing. 

Nell Geiser, Director of Research for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union, told Fierce that "operators/ISPs are cutting large numbers of jobs and outsourcing work to contractors," especially in areas where there's no union agreement that bars outsourcing technician work. Geiser added that wireline technicians and call center workers "have seen massive cuts in the past decade, in the range of 30 to 60 percent, varying by company and function. In wireless, retail workers have experienced a similar level of cuts."

Meanwhile, things like acquisitions and divestitures – which often come with restructuring initiatives – can "introduce lumpiness in the figures a company shows over time," Del Deo added.

Del Deo explained it's hard to pin down exactly how much each factor contributes to changes in the workforce. He also noted that "the mix of employees and tasks" is always changing.

"Companies constantly reallocate resources to match needs," Del Deo said. "To give a made up example, if you automate 100 jobs (say, switchboard operators), you could still create 20 doing something else (say, wireless handset sales) and still be down a net 80."

But the throughline tends to be efficiency. Other analysts contacted by Fierce noted everything operators are trying to achieve, particularly with AI and automation, will result in even fewer people than they have today. 

“Companies are trying to get more efficient in what they do. More efficiency means fewer people,” said Recon Analytics Principal Roger Entner. 

“The promise of 5G has been automation. Automation means fewer people," he continued. "Most of the reduction in force has been on the operations side of the business.” 

Keep in mind, the telecom industry in general is in the throes of a workforce shortage, particularly on the construction and technician side. The advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is poised to replace more human jobs with AI, even if operators aren’t ready to admit it. 

Similarly, TD Cowen analyst Gregory Williams noted that automation is both reducing costs (i.e. headcounts) for telcos “while improving customer experience.” He added, AI has been in the telco customer service space “for longer than most people realize,”  in the form of chat bots, self-monitoring networks, alerts and more. 

While a massive AI displacement of human jobs isn’t happening yet, operators these days are largely outsourcing their customer service and field work, Entner said. “70% of fiber build out[s] [are] civil engineering work. All outsourced.” 

“There is no AT&T blue or T-Mobile Magenta backhoe digging trenches,” he added. 

Indeed, CWA’s Ceilidh Gao told Fierce last year it’s fairly common for ISPs to subcontract work to a third party, which not only raises safety concerns but it results in “a shortage of good jobs.” 

If Chua is right, the rise of super-powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the coming years could make things worse. While operators insist they see AI as way to augment rather than replace human performance, Chua argued that position is unrealistic given where AI is headed. And given telcos' affinity for cutting costs, why wouldn't they cut headcount further if they had the means to do so?

Restructuring is another layoff factor 

But it’s not all AI and automation’s fault. Remember that comment about restructuring up top? Well, it seems it has played a key role in workforce changes as well. 

Major operators for years have undergone their fair share of restructuring and offloading assets. But they haven’t all gone down the same road. 

As Entner noted, AT&T lost WarnerMedia and DirecTV while Verizon went from “a highly distributed organization to a HQ-centric organization – and back.” Whereas T-Mobile was “always lean” and lacked a “labor-heavy, trade union heavy workforce.” 

The future could see AT&T and Verizon’s headcounts look very similar to T-Mobile's, he concluded, though the latter will have some more employees than it does today “due to their fiber and business ambitions.” 

4/3/2025 11:20 am ET: This story has been updated to include comments from Roy Chua and Nell Geiser.