The Communications Workers of America Local 3122 took the unusual step of requesting a formal elevator safety inspection at AT&T's six-story Miami office, bringing in Miami-Dade County's Office of Elevator Safety to evaluate equipment that the union says has been malfunctioning for more than two and a half years. The building serves approximately 530 AT&T employees. According to the union, the elevators have been regularly out of service and routinely trap passengers, creating conditions that go well beyond inconvenience into genuine safety territory.
The severity of the situation is underscored by employee accounts of having to climb out between floors to escape stalled elevators. That is not a minor complaint. Self-rescue from a stalled elevator car, particularly climbing through a partially opened door into a hoistway or squeezing between a car and a landing, is one of the most dangerous things a building occupant can do. It is the scenario that kills and injures people, not the entrapment itself. The fact that employees have felt compelled to do this repeatedly points to a sustained failure of both the equipment and the building's emergency response protocols.
CWA Local 3122 President Christopher Walterson was direct about the situation. He said AT&T's response to the union's concerns confirmed "what we already know: the elevators don't work, and people are getting stuck on a regular basis." The union's decision to escalate to the county's elevator safety office rather than continue negotiating internally with AT&T reflects a judgment that the company had not moved fast enough on its own. For a union representing telecom workers rather than building trades, invoking the authority having jurisdiction over elevator safety was a notably aggressive move.
AT&T has acknowledged the problem. The company stated that it plans to begin elevator replacement at the Miami office in March 2026. If that timeline holds, it means the elevators will have been in a known state of chronic malfunction for roughly three years before replacement work begins. That gap between identification and remediation is not unusual in commercial real estate, where elevator modernization and replacement projects involve long lead times for engineering, permitting, equipment procurement, and contractor scheduling. But it is the kind of timeline that looks indefensible when employees are getting trapped on a regular basis and resorting to self-rescue.
The broader lesson for building owners and property managers is that elevator problems do not stay contained. When equipment chronically fails in a building with hundreds of daily users, the issue eventually reaches the authority having jurisdiction, whether through a union, a tenant complaint, or an injury. Miami-Dade County has one of the more active elevator safety offices in the country, and an inspection prompted by a formal union complaint is likely to receive thorough attention. For the elevator industry, this case is a reminder that deferred maintenance and delayed modernization carry costs that extend well beyond the equipment itself. They erode trust, create liability, and eventually force the kind of public scrutiny that no building owner wants.