A Journal on AT&T Inc, FMLA and Corporate Impunity

MC Patterson Everett, WA

Sep 29, 2022

I had worked as a software engineer in IT in the US for more than 30 years. I was a successful woman with advanced experience and education in this field and discipline and was a proud employee of AT&T Wireless. In 2005 the IT workplace environment drastically changed. Cingular Wireless (SBC Communications) had then recently purchased AT&T Wireless and muscularly introduced their heavy-handed workplace IT culture. This toxic IT culture further thrived when a few years later SBC acquired the larger AT&T Corporation (in 2017 enterprise valued at over $350 Billion), today simply called AT&T Corporation or AT&T Inc.

This is my experience and story at Cingular, later AT&T Corporation, through 2016 and today.

Culture of Falsification

These below are only a few examples of the prolific culture of falsification as standard practice at AT&T Corp since 2005 to today:

AT&T has falsified evidence and affidavits to the Federal Court to cover up their illegal actions and manipulate the court and the justice system. These falsifications conveniently allow them to aggressively control the narrative as well as the court by severely limiting the damaged party’s ability to present the fullness of the facts.  This falsification involves the highest echelons of the corporation.      

Working in IT at the company, we were told Not to enter all extra unpaid hours spent on a project, to keep the numbers per week on record at 50 hours max. This fraudulently understates the cost of projects and makes the organization and the corporation, to the outside auditors, appear to be a better and cost-efficient corporation than the truth.  

We were frequently told to charge our time to the wrong project numbers, and if you get any fallout from that, the manager will give you yet another incorrect number to which we should apply your hours. There seemed to be never a clear picture of what truly were the project costs.

We were told to lie blatantly and on record about project delivery dates, appearing that everything was well when they were not.

When filling internal company documents particularly administrative ones – we were instructed and directed by our managers what to say, without explanation of intended purpose or outcome, just do it.  

We were told to use phone calls to communicate with others; and limit communication using emails, this is to avoid evidence during litigation. AT&T does not like to keep records, as we see later, they create documentation ad-hoc as their need arises to ensure their benefit.

We were instructed to approve and buy an expensive vendor software product and then not allowed to ask questions necessary to install and use the product successfully. We paid a sizable sum for the product, and it miserably failed from the start.

AT&T Code of Business Conduct says the employee should feel safe in reporting discriminatory behavior; the truth is you are black-listed in the company’s internal ‘EEO’ system, you will be blamed for the discrimination, the offending person will not receive even the least corrective action or advisement.

Senior Technical Directors have zero technology background.

Mission Critical systems are not backed up, contrary to what the paying customer believes.

Despite what all their internal documents say and what the company says publicly, FMLA is simply not available at AT&T, you pursue it at your own risk of immediate termination.

The Brahman Problem and the Caste Agenda

I had worked with little or no issue with men and women from many international cultures, in the US and abroad in the course of my life and career.  At Cingular Wireless and then AT&T Corp, encountering systemic discrimination at the scale I did in 2005 and onward was unparalleled. The main bad-actors were bands of men from countries where discrimination of women is legal and supported by the structures of society and government. We see enough international news from countries where women are violated, tortured or killed, rationalized with these women not wearing the veil correctly, engaging with a lower caste, walking by themselves at night or being with a man not her husband. If these levels of violence do not happen in the US it does not mean that the expectation of how a woman should act is different. These attitudes are allowed to permeate and cross borders, without check and accountability, brought into the US and institutionalized, albeit rarely openly discussed.

In Technology circles in the US, this harassment is pronounced because of the sheer number of these men brought in en masse without local or effective re-training and education. The problem is that discrimination and these actions are fully supported by hierarchies of corporate management, men and women born and raised in the US. This institutionalized misogynistic behavior cannot be talked about without the woman being outrightly blamed for the problem.

Here is my story and my experience; some texts are in the third person to help with context and clarity.

Ab initio, the woman co-worker, one without a senior title, no-matter what her qualifications are, is considered at the bottom of the hierarchy. A woman is supposed to speak softly, not ask a question or offer an analysis of the problem-at-hand, lest it be a challenge to the Brahman’s manhood. If the woman is ‘told’ to do something, she should just do it without any capability to ask any necessary questions and be able accomplish the technical task correctly without error.  She does not deserve the answers to accomplish the work. If not done per the Brahman’s demand then she is publicly chastised. If you are the only woman in a group of Brahmans, not just one will chastise you, but the rest, gang-like behavior will follow suit. She is demoted, her person is attacked en masse, her reputation and long-term career destroyed.

She is excluded from the communication threads, so she forced to work with significant blind-spots. And if she is the one that the customers seek out, she is cast aside to force the customers to communicate with the Brahmans. When she solves technical problems that the Brahmans did not or could not, it is thus her fault for knowing how to do this and not sharing what she knows to the Brahman men in the group.  

In one year, I put in over 500 unpaid overtime hours to complete the priorly failing 5-million-dollar project. I was strategically assigned to this precisely because it was failing. There were a number of Brahman technical leads on the project those last few years, when the project was floundering halfway through. I was brought in and was able to take this large project to successful completion in <11 months.

I was chastised for my effort after successful completion and then told I did not speak softly enough. I was supposed to flatter a Brahman lead who could not by his means take this project to any successful conclusion.

It was this Brahman lead (I did not report to him) that was responsible for the failures of this large project to begin with and who would speak the loudest with his most direly destructive, unrelenting, incendiary, unsolicited, and public criticism of my character, right when I first joined the project in 2012. I was the only woman in my group of mostly Brahmans reporting to a Brahman manager.  The Brahman lead made sure I was not to be made Lead in the group (as I had been told I would) as he wanted my Brahman co-worker to be in that position. This brutal character assassination had continued despite my efforts, unacknowledged leadership and successes in saving this multi-million-dollar project; all with negligible management acknowledgement or support and the severe lack of technical staff. The Brahman lead detested that I was a key person in the team with the skill-set, background and work ethic necessary to deliver the products and solve technical problems; and importantly that I had our customers’ respect and appreciation. He would then bar me from communicating directly with the customers and would force customers to communicate with my Brahman peers instead.

I was not allowed to contact other organizations without going through my then Brahman manager. I would have to ask his permission before I made contact. He would direct my Brahman co-workers to be the ones to contact the outside organization. I was not allowed visibility for my work and accomplishments. I had the most breadth and depth of knowledge and could solve the most difficult problems in the group; being female and not of their race or caste, this was clearly reprehensible for these Brahmans.

This control of communication serves multiple purposes, one is so my Brahman co-workers can shine. The other that it provides the Brahman manager the ability to artificially force the hiring of more Brahmans by creating added and unnecessary bureaucracy, amid forced and contrived circumstances.

The Brahman is regularly touted as being the most knowledgeable and technology-savvy, which is a fallacy. My Brahman Senior Technical Director manager was an accountant, he hired a number Brahmans to surround him. He blindly followed whatever they told him. He could not answer technology questions, strategy, technology direction on his own.  He could not discern when he was wrongfully informed by these men. His men were his shield, to the detriment of those who were not so. 

We were required to do brutal 24-hour on-call shifts. I asked for the option to choose multiple 12-hour shifts, but that was simply not allowed by the Brahman manager. No questions asked, much less, from a woman. The agenda was to make things as hard as possible, so as to artificially force their argument to hire more Brahmans from abroad. Artificially manipulating knowledge, systems and processes to force a self-perpetuating hiring of more men was an ongoing goal; being there one could see it in everyday decisions being made.

This is not to say that all Brahmans are like this, there are those who do not bring the Brahman male cabal, sexist, harassment, and overpowering culture into the corporation. I did not encounter this issue in my prior employments or before 2005 when AT&T Wireless was purchased by Cingular/SBC Communications and later AT&T Corp; despite representation from cultures from the Near East and geophysical Indian subcontinent.  This toxic culture and the depth of it is a function of the SBC-Cingular-AT&T Inc. corporate ethic.

The misogynistic and harassing behavior is somehow supported, protected, even espoused by corporate management. Just because the AT&T Code of Business Conduct says this behavior is not tolerated, in fact it is tolerated. The lone woman in the group who raises these issues, is blamed for any problems arising from this sexist behavior.

If you are female and not of the race or the caste, and no senior title to your name, you deserve no answers, no help, no acknowledgement for what you have completed successfully. You are excluded from conversations, not allowed to call meetings and not allowed to talk to peers from other organizations without first asking permission from your Brahman manager.

These Brahmans protect each other, share information only with each other, you would also see a Brahman chain-of-command up to the highest echelons of the corporation. This structure and the continuity of the unaccountable behavior are easily supported by key executive drivers of the AT&T Corporation.

The Gaslighting

A Brahman lead excluded me from an exceptionally large upgrade project for 7 months; after which I was invited to a meeting and then told I will have to complete this large untested environment upgrade in 2 weeks. My Brahman peers had been included in the project the first 7 months and tested their own upgrades; an intentional handicap forced on me, and an outright setup for failure.  I asked for help from my manager, and then from his director, who then sent my plea to the technology-illiterate manager of the Brahman lead. This technology-illiterate manager came down on me so severely and said I was supposed to accept this lead’s challenge and that I needed to honor him. (I refer to this situation with this Brahman lead again in the subsequent ‘FMLA’ section)

I was publicly laughed at when I offered a Brahman lead to take the place of a Brahman contractor that was leaving the group.

I was working our very first installation of new vendor software at AT&T, there was no internal knowledge or installations to draw from. I worked most all my waking hours 7 days a week consistently for more than 4 months until completion. I then submitted a report of the completed system with instructions on passwords and others, ready for delivery to testing and usage by developers. My Brahman lead called me that evening, in middle of the night, to reprimand me for not completing the project. I learned afterwards that the organization had hired a number of contractors to install the same software separately. My installation was the only one that worked.

A Brahman publicly announced that I did not deliver a task that he told me to do; when I had repeatedly asked questions surrounding it months earlier and I had not received any reply or acknowledgment to those questions. I inferred that he was no longer interested in the work.  How many times was I supposed to pursue and seek answers necessary for the end-product to work?

A Brahman reprimanded me for asking a technical question of someone from his team regarding a deployment, angry that I dared ask a question.

I called a meeting to invite all concerned about testing going on at post-installation. A Brahman admonished me for not asking permission from him to call the meeting.

The Brahman who conveniently and frequently would not read my response emails, or would read and deny he saw them, reprimanded and threatened me publicly and accused me of not following the order given me.    

A Brahman demanded from me without context, in the middle of the night during deployment, that I am to change key system passwords. I had to head a large meeting in the middle of the night with many irritated people for this password change since I did not have access to do so. As the large group met and discussed, it was clear that changing the passwords would have damaged that evening’s deployment. This is just the least of what happens when the woman is not allowed to ask questions. If the Brahman does not understand the question, he should say so. Instead, the expectation is that the woman should just do what she is told; then when she does and there is fall-out, she is placed on the spot with nothing to hold on to and no one to whom she can reach out for help.

The managers to whom the cabal of Brahmans report, many have no technology literacy and cannot understand the least of the technology problems in front of them. Their judgment is flawed by ignorance, or denial, and with not even a remote analysis of the facts, their next move is thus character assassination of the woman that has asked for help. The corporate structure supports and implicitly encourages this outright sexism and harassment with cult-like embrace and protection of the Brahman men and their cohorts.

AT&T Corp would hide behind the Brahman organizations and supporting structures to further goals of profits at any cost, including every possible human cost of ruthlessness and abuse, without accountability to the laws in the US. Whatever they can do to get away with this, they will do.  The end-resulting products are not always true to how they appear on the surface.

FMLA – an Impossible Dream

My older brother fell profoundly ill in March 2016. I was his power-of-attorney, and caregiver, advocate, emotional support – even if only to help him want to continue his care and not give up. I immediately announced this to my manager and lead.

No one at AT&T offered me anything called FMLA, I did not know it existed. I used my personal time and comp-time for all my brother’s doctors’ visits and hospital stays.

During most all of August 2016, my brother was at the hospital again with uncontrollable seizures and at times very close to death.  During the whole time, I was working at AT&T during the day, and staying at the hospital with him at night. The hospital was not going to continue his care if there was no one from the family with him, I could not get anyone else to help me with this.  Advocating for him, finding the right care required my mind and heart to be with him. My presence and full engagement with the nurses and doctors were compelling factors in saving his life that month.  

The question of FMLA came up midway that month of August, in the middle of my brother’s hospital stay.  I had a meeting with my manager and my lead (my lead raised the option).  

This manager, a woman, was at the time recently made my manager after I raised the issue with the system upgrade. This manager (Sr Technical Director) was also the manager of the Brahman lead that was making those 2-week schedule demands of me, after giving me a 7-month handicap. (please reference Gaslighting section). This new reporting structure ensured that I would get the worst possible consideration for any needs or requests I raise to my management.  My Sr Technical Director woman manager was an unmistakable puppet to this Brahman lead that worked for her. She had been given this position because there was no other place for her to go.

Clearly my manager was not interested in helping me with FMLA in August 2016. Either through ignorance or apathy, if not disdain, she threw barrier after barrier at me for the FMLA request I asked from her. That she and only she could start the process, that was perfectly clear.  She was instead forcing me to use their internal company leave – not FMLA, and not one which would offer job protection by the US government. And no way is AT&T going to allow that to be had.

AT&T has created systemic and structural roadblocks to ensure FMLA is not accessible; the corporation strategically places staff with little or no knowledge of FMLA capabilities in key places in the organization – to ensure nothing really gets processed to further an FMLA request.  FMLA ‘processing’ sits squarely in the HR organization and your manager. HR is the large organization that communicates and teaches managers what to say and do regarding personnel, including leave requests, hiring and firing, and FMLA; this includes tracking people with FMLA requests and ensuring that the request goes nowhere.  This also includes help in falsifying documents to submit to government and legal institutions if the illegal termination is discovered. The function of FMLA denial and cover-up is part of that structure at AT&T Corp, designed, accepted and supported at the executive levels.

In August 2016, with my brother severely ill. With his care dependent on only me, I had no emotional energy to argue with my manager about FMLA. It was clear she had to be the one to be fully engaged to start the process. The company makes sure that people at the lowest levels of staff and management who are key people in any advancement of your cause, either are inhuman, illiterate, ignorant-by-design or ignorant-by-choice of any capability to invoke and pursue FMLA, a legitimate government-supported and sanctioned leave.  It is not enough to ask for FMLA at AT&T, you must argue for it. And if you argue hard enough to pursue it, that only triggers AT&T to reprise you with other personally destructive and ultimately tragic ways.

So I continued using my personal time and comp-time for my brother’s care, doing all I could to extend and maybe even find a way to save his life.

My brother still needed continuous care and attention and emotional support after August 2016. It was a profound illness with low-single-digits chances of survival. I was at the edge of my own emotional strength keeping up my deliverables at AT&T and then keeping my brother as well as I possibly could. It is not my nature to drop anything that I am responsible for, I just work harder, so I continued working my best at both my job at AT&T and my brother’s care.

I was terminated after I again raised the FMLA subject to my manager and my need for it. After a long delay, this time, my manager went ahead and submitted the application for FMLA in my name (why could she not do this in August?). That was pretense; as I was finally provided with the forms for FMLA completion and submission, I was outrightly terminated.

Then, 2 weeks after my last day at AT&T, while I was with my brother heading to a medical appointment, he collapsed. All attempts at resuscitation failed and he died.

After my notice of termination, my brother had stopped honest conversation with me about the state of his health and the pain and symptoms he was feeling. He blamed himself for my job loss. My mind, heart and physical health have never been the same since.

AT&T covered-up that termination indicating I did not ask for FMLA in August and that I was on the list for termination all along. That was entirely false. AT&T submitted falsified evidence and falsified affidavits to the Federal court to cover-up these actions.

On top of all, this Judge and his court are notorious for being hostile to employment cases. This was used and abused by AT&T Corp as license to manipulate the Judge, his court and the justice system, with great audacity and arrogance, obfuscating the facts with confusion and false affidavits and falsified evidence, making the utmost fool of the Judge and his staff.  I could not get to a trial because of these fraudulent documents submitted to the court.

Conclusion

AT&T can and uses its power, with hundreds of billions of dollars and its ensuing corporate muscle to crush anyone asking for FMLA, a federally-protected legal accommodation, with which they do not want to comply; they will seek and destroy that person, her career and her life. The value of the human life that needs love, compassion and care – really does not matter.  To AT&T Corp, the absolute truth of illness and death and the need to care for disabled or profoundly ill family, are irrelevant. I cannot turn back time to convince my brother that my job loss was not his fault, or to do all I could before the end of his life to make sure he felt unconditionally loved. Or could he have lived longer had he freely communicated his symptoms to me?

AT&T will use all possible capabilities to destroy a person; character assassination is a tool to be used aggressively, let us blame the victim as viciously as possible to hide the truth, and get away with it.

To add, why are cheap and easily manufactured character assassination statements given any weight at all instead of weighing the facts of a case?  Giving weight to already highly prejudiced character assassination means that anyone who is already in a weak position and harassed due to something she cannot change (female, educated, skilled in the field), a woman who needs government-protected time off to care for family, does Not deserve FMLA.

As the assigned judge was notoriously hostile to employment cases, surrounded by staff with the same prejudice, an individual plaintiff attorney will do his work in trepidation, that any move at all might be spun, manipulated and portrayed as a misstep and thus risk sanctions by the hostile judge. The hostility of the court is exacerbated by the aggressive battery of AT&T lawyers. The individual plaintiff attorney has a near-zero chance of representing his client on any level-playing field. The single plaintiff lawyer without the depth of funding, without the muscular weight and resources of AT&T Corporation, risks to lose everything in the face of this already highly prejudiced Judge and his court, and a heavily funded and financially cushioned legal team. Now AT&T lawyers can afford the risk of major missteps, and can submit downright duplicitous documents from AT&T to the Federal court, they can financially afford risk of sanction.

AT&T Corporation’s next move is thus a piece of cake. The strategy is to aggressively hide the facts: submit fraudulent evidence and affidavits, and stop any conversation outside the space of the parameters they set. The judge and his staff, already manipulated, choose to believe the corporation’s falsified affidavits and evidence.

AT&T has now, with impunity, made a fool of the Federal court, without the least regard for the rule of law. What is then the point of the justice system if the monied and powerful can manipulate the courts? What is the point if the sole person, already emotionally and financially damaged by the actions caused by AT&T Corp, is denied her only hope in that what was the constitutional right to a trial?