---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <20160519032149.GA24696@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 23:21:49 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Obama Administration Gets Verizon and Strikers Talking Again by Aaron Pressman Verizon Communications and the two unions representing about 40,000 workers on strike for the past month have reopened talks, this time with a federal mediator involved. The new talks, prompted by Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, could head off what was becoming an increasingly bitter and acrimonious strike, the largest labor action in five years. Sporadic talks in recent week made no progress. http://fortune.com/2016/05/18/obama-administration-gets-verizon-and-strikers-talking-again/ -- Bill Horne ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20160519032912.GA25023@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 23:29:12 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Who's "overpaid" at Verizon? By Alan Maass PITY THE poor Verizon executives. They're dealing with a strike by union workers who as individuals earn several times more in a year than the median income for a whole household--but they just keep demanding more and more, don't they? That's the line that Verizon bosses are feeding the corporate press in the hopes that ordinary people who read it will resent the workers, and not them. Not surprisingly, the company's side of the story is showing up verbatim in news reports. https://socialistworker.org/2016/05/18/whos-overpaid-at-verizon -- Bill Horne ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20160519031932.GA24552@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 23:19:32 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Lawmakers slam Frontier for bad phone and Internet service By Meg James Frontier Communications said Wednesday that within the next 10 days it should resolve the backlog of phone and Internet service problems that cropped up during the company's tumultuous take-over of Verizon FiOS systems. More than 200 customers in California still are without phone service, Frontier's West region president, Melinda White, told members of the Assembly Committee on Utilities and Commerce in Sacramento. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-frontier-puc-verizon-switch-20160518-snap-story.html -- Bill Horne ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20160519032555.GA24866@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 23:25:55 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: CWA agrees to federal mediator, prepares sellout of Verizon strike By Samuel Davidson After telling striking workers for weeks that it would not accede to Verizon's demands for a federal mediator, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) agreed to mediation yesterday during talks in Washington, DC overseen by the Obama administration. The CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are preparing a reprise of the sellout of the 2011 strike, which was shut down after two weeks with the unions telling workers they should place their confidence in a federal mediator. Predictably Obama's mediator imposed a contract that imposed sweeping health care concessions on behalf of the telecom giant. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/18/veri-m18.html -- Bill Horne ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20160519034349.GA25560@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 23:43:49 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.biz> Subject: AT&T Lobbyists Fail to Block Competition in Missouri by Karl Bode One of the major reasons that AT&T is imposing usage caps next week (May 23) is because the company continues to face limited broadband competition. And the company faces limited competition in large part because it has been able to lobby state level governments -- for the better part of a generation -- to do everything in their power to protect AT&T from serious competition. That includes AT&T's practice of ghost writing protectionist laws in more than a dozen states prohibiting towns and cities from exploring alternative options in the face of limited competition. In Missouri, we recently noted how AT&T tried to hinder broadband competition by convincing Representative Lyndall Fraker to bury anti-competitive language in an un-related traffic bill. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Lobbyists-Fail-to-Block-Competition-in-Missouri-136978 -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Thu, 19 May 2016