Skilled workers hard to find in U.S. says AT&T CEO

Reuters has a brief article up today quoting the CEO of phone giant AT&T bemoaning the fact that his company is having trouble finding enough skilled workers in the U.S. able to fill all of the 5,000 customer service jobs currently outsourced to India. In remarks made before a business gathering today AT&T Chief Randall Stephenson said only 1,400 of the targeted 5,000 jobs to be returned from overseas customer service centers in Bangalore, India had been filled by the company.

Stephenson blamed the lack of skilled workers in the U.S. as the main obstacle to filling the 5,000 slots AT&T pledged to fill back in 2006. The article went on to say that, Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent.

If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down," he said.

Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

How can U.S. citizens compete in a global economy when our educational institutions and local communities fail so many young people entering the workforce? Anti-free-trade and anti-globalization rhetoric from trade unionists and their Democratic vassals won't solve the problem of why Johnny can't answer the phone, do math and handle a computer in the 21st Century.

Our educational institutions from the smallest grade schools to largest centers of higher learning need to become conservatories of scholarship and achievement rather than warehouses for groupthink, speech codes and political correctness. This will be only be realized when parents, clergy, (yes clergy) educators, and business people band together with a common purpose to discard the feel-good curricula of lower expectations for our youth in exchange for real learning and sciences.