Detroit U-verse technicians are at high risk of being confronted by crooks looking for valuable electronics.

AT&T U-verse technicians carry iPads, cell phones, and other expensive electronic equipment in trucks destined for service calls, and the crooks know it.

At least 10 technicians have been robbed in northwest Detroit in the last week alone, some at gunpoint.

“They’re scared. Afraid to go in certain areas,” said CWA Union President Greg Streeby. “A tech was approached by an individual with a gun who said, ‘Give me your iPad.’

So far, union leaders have been unimpressed with the reaction of AT&T, leading one worker to suggest the company does not care if technicians live or die.

Thieves learned AT&T’s U-verse branded trucks come stocked with expensive electronics, including cell phones and iPads, and they have become magnets for smash and grab robberies while technicians are inside customer homes. Since the robberies began, some technicians have started bringing valuable equipment inside with them.

Thieves learned to adapt, and are now willing to confront technicians as they return to their trucks, sometimes at gunpoint, and order them to hand over the electronics. Technicians have lost phones, laptops, tablets, and whatever else the thieves can steal and resell.

Jim Simons has never seen anything like it, and he has been working for AT&T as a field technician for more than 20 years.

“We are defenseless. We don’t carry any weapons,” Simons told WDIV News. “Not allowed to.”

AT&T workers were told by administrators there is nothing the company can do about the robberies, at which point a group of workers left and began a union-backed protest outside of several AT&T facilities across Detroit.

AT&T promptly locked out those workers and deactivated their ID badges, and their vehicles remain locked and inaccessible inside AT&T gated parking lots.

The company claims it is working on a solution, but union officials want an extra service technician temporarily sent on service calls in dangerous areas to keep an eye on the company’s property while another worker attends to the customer. AT&T has rejected that proposal.

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WDIV first told its Detroit audience about the AT&T holdups last Friday in this exclusive report. (2 minutes)

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Since WDIV’s first report, safety conditions have further deteriorated for AT&T workers, some of whom have now begun public protests outside of AT&T facilities demanding more safety while on service calls. (2 minutes)

Unionized employees of AT&T were sent home across California and Nevada earlier this week when they turned up for work wearing stickers with the letters “WTF,” as part of an ongoing protest against AT&T’s unwillingness to renew their contract without reducing workers’ benefits.

The stickers, which stand for “Where’s the Fairness” are causing consternation for AT&T, which believes the message may offend customers.

U-verse technicians in San Jose were the first to wear the stickers late last week, which some might interpret more colorfully as, “What the (explicative).”  AT&T sent those workers home and now other unionized employees across the region have started wearing the stickers in solidarity.

The union says the company’s response to the stickers is creating chaos for AT&T management, who are scrambling to replace the workers unavailable to respond to scheduled service calls and handle other technical tasks.

AT&T says otherwise.  Spokesman John Britton says the company was prepared in advance for any labor issues and says the majority of service calls were performed without interruption or delay.

“While we respect our employees’ right to express their opinions, it is our policy to require appropriate dress for our employees in customer-facing positions,” AT&T said in a written statement. “We sent some employees home after they refused to remove ‘WTF’ stickers, or buttons, from their clothing before leaving the office to work in and around customer homes and businesses.”

The Communications Workers of America represents about 18,000 AT&T technicians and call-center employees in California and Nevada.  The union says locking out employees wearing the stickers is a violation of federal law, which protects “concerted labor-related activities” including wearing t-shirts, buttons, or stickers as part of the union’s protest.

CWA District 9 has filed an Unfair Labor Practice Charge against AT&T for the employee lockout, and the company has since reportedly indicated it will take no action against union members who wore the “WTF” stickers before or in the future.

Verizilla

The Communications Workers of America has a new, decidedly low-budget video decrying a spectrum swap between America’s largest cable companies and Verizon Communications that will leave Verizon Wireless stores pitching cable television service from one of Verizon’s cable company competitors.

To the CWA, this is nothing less than the birth of Verizilla, a new monster of a telecommunications company that has capitulated on competing with Big Cable and will instead devour the wireless communications marketplace for itself.  The CWA interest is obvious: many of its employees are responsible for constructing and maintaining Verizon’s now-stalled FiOS fiber to the home network.

From the CWA:

The deal, struck behind the closed doors of America’s corporate boardrooms, poses a threat to consumers and workers. If it goes through, it will be the death knell for competition between cable and telecom companies. Verizon Wireless, Time Warner, Comcast, and other cable companies will become a giant, unregulated quasi-monopoly. Verizon will have no incentive to challenge cable by building FiOS into new areas — meaning less competition, consumer choice, and higher prices for consumers.

Less FiOS also means fewer jobs building, maintaining, servicing, and installing the network. This deal will create a corporate behemoth that will use exclusive quad-play market power to shrink its future workforce.

Worst of all, Verizon Wireless and the cable companies are refusing to come clean about the details of the deal. Even as the FCC and Department of Justice review it, we still don’t know what it means for consumers or workers.

The CWA has so far collected more than 135,000 signatures on its petition opposing the current form of the deal. 

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Verizilla.flv[/flv]

America, say hello to Verizilla, wreaking reduced investment havoc on Verizon service areas across the northeastern United States.  (2 minutes)

Wall Street is encouraging Verizon Communications to sell off its landline telephone operations to clear a path for a potentially-profitable merger with British mobile phone company Vodafone Group Plc.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs Group are behind the research report, which suggests Verizon’s recent non-aggression treaty with Comcast and Time Warner Cable makes the sale of Verizon’s landline phone and FiOS fiber to the home network more likely. Verizon will earn a percentage of every cable TV/phone/broadband subscription sold, effectively making Verizon’s own wired network redundant. Potential buyers could include Frontier Communications, CenturyLink, or Windstream, which all have business plans that depend on landline networks fewer Americans are using.

Should Verizon clear away its legacy landline and FiOS networks, Goldman Sachs suggests, a merger with Vodafone would be a “clear fit” for the two companies.

“The remaining wireless and enterprise businesses would have faster growth and a clear fit with Vodafone’s assets and strategy, making it a more attractive merger partner,” Bloomberg News quotes from the report.

“Given that it no longer faces the threat of integrated cable competitors, Verizon could potentially spin off its remaining [landline] assets,” along with “large” pension and benefit liabilities, the Goldman analysts added.

Verizon would also eliminate its ongoing dispute with the two largest unions representing its landline workers — Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.  Both unions are still trying to negotiate a new contract with Verizon after a brief, but contentious, summer strike. Verizon Wireless is almost entirely non-unionized.

Vodafone’s share price has been rising recently, perhaps anticipating a potential merger that would give Vodafone a stronger hand in the U.S. marketplace.

Verizon’s investment in its landline network, along with interest in expanding its well-regarded FiOS fiber to the home service, has remained stalled for the past few years.  Recently, the company indicated an interest in moving away from fiber optics to serve broadband customers, and rely on its wireless LTE 4G network instead.

Verizon’s new CEO Lowell McAdam comes from Verizon’s wireless division, and has not shared his predecessor’s enthusiasm for fiber upgrades.

Merger Partner?

While the prospect of an all-wireless future for Verizon may seem good for shareholders, consumers are likely to pay the price:

1. The Justice Department is reviewing the antitrust implications of the non-aggression treaty between Verizon and its cable competitors;
2. The sale of Verizon’s landline network to an independent provider could doom the company’s fiber optic network and limit rural Verizon customers to 1-3Mbps DSL;
3. Verizon Wireless’ prices reflect its market share and lack of strong competition.  The company’s LTE wireless network, although fast, has suffered from reliability problems and is heavily usage-limited.  It may prove unsuitable as a home broadband replacement for rural customers;
4. Reduced competition for telephone, video, and broadband will likely result in higher prices for existing cable subscribers, too.

Verizon is hardly the first phone company to ponder getting out of the phone business.  AT&T has been lobbying to rescind rural universal service requirements for years.  If successful, AT&T could abandon its rural landline network and provide customers with higher-priced cell phone service instead.

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Verizon’s unionized workers are still fighting for a new contract, and released this parody video in response to a company-produced DVD mailed to union workers’ homes.  (3 minutes)

Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen got himself off script and tangled in the percentages over the weekend when he told German magazine Focus the merger deal between AT&T and T-Mobile that the CWA has been cheerleading since it was first announced had little chance of coming to pass.

Cohen told Focus the chance of the deal getting beyond the current court challenge from the U.S. Department of Justice was around 20 percent. That seemed to signal the union was getting in line with those prepared to throw the current merger deal under the nearest bus.

Soon after that quote came home on the Bloomberg News wires (and reached AT&T), it didn’t take long for a revised quote (that a union spokesperson would later claim to be a “clarification”) to appear in a subsequent story:

There is about a 60 percent chance of a settlement between the companies and the Justice Department, Cohen said in a telephone interview today. Should the case go to court, it would be 50-50 on which way the decision would go, he said.

But the fuzzy math truly got exposed when the Wall Street Journal got this explanation for the discrepancy:

A spokeswoman for CWA said it was mostly a case of fuzzy math. Mr. Cohen’s point, she said, was that there was a 60% chance that the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the deal would be settled out of court.

But in the 40% chance that it didn’t, then there was a 50-50 chance that the company would prevail, which he may or may not have stated as 20 percent.

In reality, he meant to say that it was more likely than not that the case would be settled and the merger would succeed, the spokeswoman said.

“Perhaps it wasn’t the best of use of math,” she said. “Things got lost in the percentages.”

So, did AT&T push for the comments to be clarified? “I had some exchanges with my counterpart at AT&T, yes,” she said. “I sent her our clarification… which is good.”