And Who Gets Hired After a Layoff?

Quentin C. Stodola’s letter (“AT&T; Investors Appear Too Busy Celebrating to Care About People,” Jan. 14) made a couple of very good points about investors’ jubilance over AT&T;’s firing 40,000 employees.

What we should do, and the press should do, is to pay close attention to who is rehired after the cuts are made and accepted. It certainly isn’t the older workers who were fired at a time when they had finally begun making a comfortable living. No, they are replaced by inexperienced young people who are paid one-third to one-half as much. We have to suspect that the corporations fire a huge number of people, in a nondiscriminatory cross-section, of course, to make sure they eliminate as many highly paid older workers as possible. Later, they can bring in entry-level workers or perhaps part-timers to hold salary costs down and improve the bottom line.

We’ve all heard of the American dream, but now we are beginning to hear of the American nightmare--the destruction of the middle-age man and woman who had given everything to an employer because they knew their jobs were safe.

Now no one wants them. They are overqualified. They run up the cost of group insurance. They are a threat to the job of the very person who is interviewing them.

God forbid, but maybe we need a law that says that the AT&Ts;, when rehiring for a given period after such a layoff, must rehire in proportion to the layoff. If 20% were over 40, then 20% of the rehires must be over 40. How would you like that, AT&T;?

Why is it that people and corporations always have to push the envelope until a new law is threatened or actually passed?

CECIL E. BYRD

Whittier