AT&T, a company that once was a poster child for telecommuting, is downsizing its long-running telework program and requiring thousands of employees who work from their homes and other virtual offices to return to traditional AT&T office environments, according to sources.

“It is a serious effort to reel in the telework people,” says Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of the Telework Coalitions, an organization in Washington, D.C., that promotes telework through education and legislative efforts.

“We have been getting calls and e-mails from very unhappy AT&T teleworking employees who are being told that they will no longer be allowed to telework,” says Wilsker, who has heard that as many as 10,000 or 12,000 full-time teleworkers may be affected.

A spokesman in AT&T’s San Antonio, Texas, headquarters denies there are broad-scale plans to end teleworking arrangements, but acknowledges there may be some isolated cases. “Teleworking is at the discretion of the business,” says Walt Sharp, the spokesman.

He says AT&T is in the process of reconciling the human resources policies of the legacy AT&T, SBC Communications, which acquired AT&T in 2005; BellSouth, which was acquired in late 2006; and the former Cingular wireless operation, previously co-owned by BellSouth and AT&T.

“We have recently merged [these] very large companies, each of which has separate policies on everything, and we’re in the process of integrating all of those policies and coming up with integrated policies for AT&T overall,” Sharp says. “I believe the teleworking policy is expected to be integrated some time next year.”

One AT&T employee, who has teleworked for more than five years, told Network World he and his team members received notice in late September that they need to resume working in an AT&T physical office “as soon as possible.”

The news was not entirely unexpected, he says, since rumors have been circulating since AT&T’s merger with SBC that the new upper management was not supportive of virtual offices. “We’d heard rumors to that effect, and all of a sudden we got marching orders to go back to an office.”

The employee says he was told the decision to end telework arrangements would apply broadly across the company and reflects a policy change by AT&T -- though that contradicts AT&T’s statement to Network World. “It’s crazy; I don’t understand it,” the employee says. “We’re a networking and communications company.”