AT&T (NYSE:T) has just recently announced that it plans on giving 200,000 of its employees a special $1,000 bonus, pending the new tax reform being signed. If the bill is signed by the government before Christmas, the company plans on giving these employees their bonus over the holidays.
Shortly after the announcement was made by the company, President Donald Trump cited this information in a news conference he had today saying, “And that’s because of what we did, that’s pretty good.”
AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson spoke on the topic stating that the tax reform will create good paying jobs and help drive economic growth across the country. Shortly after the announcement, Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) announced it would increase its companies minimum wage to $15 an hour and would ad a $400 million increase in philanthropic initiatives. Also, Fifth Third Bancorp (NASDAQ:FITB) announced due to the new tax reform that it too would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and would give a $1,000 bonus to 13,500 of its employees.
Stephenson spoke at an Economic Club of New York lunch last month and said that if the reform bill were to pass, the company would spend at “least” $1 billion and create an estimated 7,000 jobs.
He said, “From my standpoint, the driver of this is the business tax reform… if we get investment going, we get productivity going, we get wage gain going, we invest another billion dollars. Every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard hat jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. These are 7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year.”
The CEO states passing the tax would be “major” for the U.S economy and calls it “capital freeing” for corporate America.
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