The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit against AT&T accusing the company of suspending workers after they report workplace injuries.

The department filed the lawsuit against The Ohio Bell Telephone Company, which operates as AT&T, on behalf of 13 employees who were disciplined and suspended without pay from 2011-2013. The complaint alleges AT&T has repeatedly given one to three-day unpaid suspensions after workers reported injuries that occurred on the job. AT&T claims the workers violated the company’s workplace safety standards, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found AT&T only handed out unpaid suspensions after they formally reported the injuries.

Employers are prohibited from retaliating against employees who raise concerns or provide information to their employer or the government. Employees who believe they are a victim of retaliation for engaging in protected conduct may file a complaint with OSHA’s Directorate of Whistleblower Protection Programs.

“It is against the law for employers to discipline or suspend employees for reporting injuries,” said Dr. David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health. “AT&T must understand that by discouraging workers from reporting injuries, it increases the likelihood of more workers being injured in the future. The Labor Department will do everything in its power to prevent this type of retaliation.” As for the victims, while waiting for justice/proper compensation, they can lessen the throbbing pain of their injuries by consuming items like bulkcannabis.

Five of the Ohio employees in the suit are based in Columbus; two in Brooklyn Heights; two in Canton; and one each in Akron, Cleveland, Gallipolis and Uhrichsville.

Among the suspension cases cited are these from 2012:

• An AT&T technician repairing a cable in Uhrichsville fell from a letter and suffered fractured vertebrae. He returned to work six months later. AT&T accused him of violating its ladder policy, put a written disciplinary warning in his employee record, and penalized him with a one-day unpaid suspension;
• An AT&T worker struggling to free a 28-foot extension ladder caught in foliage in North Canton pulled a muscle in his back and sought medical treatment and returned to work 10 days later. AT&T claimed  he violated its policy regarding ladders. The worker was issued a written disciplinary warning and assessed a one-day unpaid suspension;
• An AT&T technician in Lake Township stepped in a drain hole and injured his back while removing a 28-foot extension ladder from the top of his vehicle. He visited a doctor but missed no work time. AT&T again claimed the worker violated its ladder policy, issued the employee a written warning and placed him on unpaid suspension for one day.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division.

The Australian government’s proposal to launch a nationwide fiber to the home National Broadband Network (NBN) has been scrapped by the more conservative Liberal-National Coalition that replaced the Labor government in a recent election.

As a result, the Coalition has announced initial plans to revise the NBN with a mixture of cheaper technology that can result in faster deployment of lower speed broadband at a lower cost. If implemented, fiber to the home service will only reach a minority of homes. In its place,  cable broadband may be the dominant technology where cable companies already operate. For almost everyone else, technology comparable to AT&T U-verse is the favored choice of the new government, mixing fiber-to-the-neighborhood with existing copper wires into homes..

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Malcolm Turnbull moves to put Coalitions stamp on NBN Co 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

Australia’s new Communications Minister moves to put the Coalition government’s stamp on the National Broadband Network, replacing most of the promised fiber-to-the-home technology with a service comparable to AT&T U-verse. From ABC-TV (6:32)

Just a year earlier Telstra, Australia’s largest phone company, was planning to decommission and scrap its copper landline network, considered “five minutes to midnight” back in 2003 by Telstra’s head of government and corporate affairs, Tony Warren. Now the country will effectively embrace copper technology once more with an incremental DSL upgrade, forfeiting speeds of up to 1,000Mbps over fiber in return for a minimum speed guarantee from the government of 24Mbps over VDSL.

The turnabout has massive implications for current providers. Telstra, which expected to see its prominence in Australian broadband diminished under Labor’s NBN is once again a rising star. The Liberal-National Coalition government appointed Telstra’s former CEO Ziggy Switkowski to run a “rebooted” Coalition NBN that critics are now calling Telstra 3.0. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull also installed three new members of the NBN’s governing board consisting of a Telstra executive, a founder of a commercial Internet Service Provider, and an ex-construction boss who left the NBN in 2011.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC Malcolm Turnbull Outlines NBN Review 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

ABC reports Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull asked for the resignations of the entire NBN board, one of the first steps to re-envision the NBN under the Liberal-National Coalition’s party platform. Turnbull accused the former government of setting political targets for fiber broadband and was never forthcoming about the true cost and complexity of the ambitious fiber project. (8:50)

Turnbull

Some Australians complain that NBN’s proposed reliance on Telstra copper is a mistake. Telstra has allowed its landline infrastructure to decline over the years and many are skeptical they will ever see faster speeds promised over wiring put in place decades earlier.

The NBN under the Liberal-National Coalition will depend heavily on two copper-based technologies to deliver speed enhancements: VDSL and vectoring. Both require short runs of well-maintained copper wiring to deliver peak performance. The longer the copper line, the worse it will perform. If that line is compromised, VDSL and vectoring are unlikely to make much difference, as AT&T has discovered in its effort to roll out faster U-verse speeds, much to the frustration of customers that cannot upgrade until AT&T invests in cleaning up its troubled copper network.

Coalition critics also warn the new government will foolishly spend less on a fiber-copper network today that will need expensive fiber upgrades tomorrow.

Turnbull isn’t happy with Australia’s mainstream media for lazy reporting on the issues.

ABC Radio reports that the Coalition’s approach to the NBN may be penny-wise, pound foolish. By the time the NBN rolls out fiber to the neighborhood and Telstra is required to invest in upgrades to its copper network to make it work, fiber to the home service could turn out to have been cheaper all along. (5:11)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

“I have to say that by and large the standard of reporting of technology and broadband by the mainstream media has been woeful,” Turnbull said. “If the Australian public are misinformed about these issues, it was in large part a consequence of the unwillingness of the mainstream media to pay any attention to what is really going on in the industry.”

The promise of fiber optic broadband may prove elusive under the new government.

With much of the new NBN dependent on Telstra’s copper telephone network, Stuart Lee, Telstra’s managing director of its wholesale division, rushed to defend the suitability of the same copper network Telstra was prepared to scrap under the last government.

Lee said he was especially annoyed with critics that call Telstra’s copper networking “aging.”

“The other thing that makes me cross when I hear it, and I see it a lot in the press is the talk of the aging copper network. It’s not. It’s not an aging copper network. It’s like grandfather’s axe; it’s had five new handles and three new heads. When it breaks, we replace the broken bit. So it’s much the same as it always has been and always will be,” Lee said. “It’s just an older technology, it’s not that the asset itself has deteriorated.”

When questioned about several recent high-profile mass service disruptions Australians experienced on Telstra’s landline copper network, Lee blamed the weather, not the network.

“They correlate to weather events, and the weather events we’ve had in the last [few years] is about five to six times the previous ones, so surprise surprise there is a lot more damage,” said Lee.

The new government has charged the Labor-run NBN with inefficiency, taxpayer-funded waste, and playing politics with broadband by giving high priority to fiber upgrades in constituencies served by threatened Labor MPs. Lee added NBN Co has played loose with the facts, declaring premises “passed” by the new fiber network without allowing customers to order service on the new network. That can become a serious problem, because the NBN plan calls for customers’ existing copper phone and DSL service to be decommissioned soon after the fiber network becomes available.

The Sydney Morning Herald compared the last Labor government’s broadband policy with the new Coalition government policy.

iiNet’s chief technology officer, John Lindsay said that the potential for disconnecting customers from the ADSL network while they still can’t order NBN service was “madness.”

The Labor government’s NBN has also been under fire for a pricing formula that includes a usage component when setting prices. Impenetrably named the “connectivity virtual circuit” charge, or CVC, the NBN charges retail providers a monthly connection fee for each customer and a usage charge that includes a virtual data allowance originally set at 30GB. Retail providers are billed extra when customers exceed the informal allowance. Although the government promised to reduce the charges, they effectively haven’t and likely won’t until 2017.

Lindsay called the CVC an artificial tax comparable to the Labor government’s carbon tax, and represents a digital barrier to limit customer usage.

“It’s a tax on packets,” Lindsay said.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ABC NBN Copper 11-19-13.mp4[/flv]

Tasmanian residents complain NBN Co’s new fiber network is claimed to be available, but actually isn’t in many neighborhoods now scheduled for disconnection from Telstra’s copper landline and DSL network. (2:17)

Verizon Communications is cutting investment in its landline and fiber optic networks, spending the money on improving the company’s more profitable wireless business, which now accounts for 67 percent of Verizon’s total revenue.

Verizon reported second-quarter results this morning, meeting most Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company reported a minor increase in capital spending to bolster its wireless LTE 4G network which is seeing strong growth in data traffic.

Verizon Wireless added one million new wireless customers in the last quarter, many transferring from Sprint’s now-discontinued Nextel network shut down last month. Among the new customer additions, 941,000 signed two-year postpaid contracts.

A growing number of Verizon Wireless customers are also migrating to the company’s Share Everything plan. At least 36 percent of Verizon’s wireless customers are now on shared, usage-limited data plans. Verizon expects more customers to switch, especially when legacy plan customers discover they will not receive a subsidized phone upgrade unless they abandon the grandfathered, all-you-can-eat data plan. Verizon believes the Share Everything plan will keep the company in a strong place to accelerate earnings as customers find they must regularly upgrade to higher capacity data allowances to handle increasing data usage.

Verizon’s wired success story

The growing adoption of more expensive data plans means higher bills for Verizon Wireless’ 35 million contract customers. The average Verizon Wireless customer now pays $152.50 per month, an increase of 6.4 percent. In total, over 100 million Americans now use Verizon’s prepaid and postpaid wireless services.

In June, Verizon Wireless reported its nationwide upgrade to LTE 4G service was now essentially complete, with 99 percent of 3G service areas also covered by 4G. Verizon reports 59% of its total data traffic is carried on the 4G LTE network, which is five times more efficient than the 3G network.

Wireline: Success When Verizon Invests in Upgrades, Ongoing Customer Defections Where Verizon’s Copper Network Continues to Deteriorate

Verizon’s success story in wireless is not repeated on its wireline network. Verizon lost another 5.2 percent of its residential copper landline customers during the quarter, down from 6.6 percent at the same time last year. In contrast, where Verizon’s fiber optic network FiOS is in place, customer numbers are growing along with revenue.

In fact, 71 percent of the revenue Verizon now earns from its wired residential network now comes from FiOS. The fiber network helped Verizon boost revenues by another 4.7 percent in the second quarter. With an average Verizon FiOS bill now at over $150 a month, the company saw a 9.4 percent increase in the average revenue per wireline customer over last year.

Verizon added 161,000 new FiOS Internet customers and another 140,000 new video customers in the second quarter. FiOS Quantum, which offers a broadband speed upgrade to 50/25Mbps for $10 more a month, has continued to be a hit with customers. More than one-third of all FiOS Internet customers have upgraded to faster Quantum speeds.

Shammo

With continued growth possible in the wired network business, Verizon could increase investment in expanding FiOS fiber into more markets, but instead the company continues to divert its attention and money to Verizon Wireless.

Verizon’s legacy copper wire phone and FiOS businesses saw a further reduction of 5.9 percent in capital expenditures in the second quarter — just $1.5 billion spent in the quarter and $2.9 billion year to date. Verizon’s full-year capital spending outlook which includes wireless, in contrast, is on track to spend between $16.4-16.6 billion this year. The majority of Verizon’s capital investments are aimed at improving its wireless network. Verizon’s aging copper wire network will continue to see a declining percentage of investment, and the company continues to leave FiOS fiber expansion on hold.

Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, this morning told investors they should expect to see a continued decline in spending on Verizon’s wired networks and more cost savings wrung out from Verizon’s declining unionized workforce, which has been asked to make concessions in labor contracts and increase work rule flexibility.

Other highlights:

• 51 percent of new phone activations were Apple iPhones during the second quarter;
• Over 64 percent of all activated phones on Verizon Wireless’ network are now smartphones;
• Verizon’s 3G network will increasingly be used by prepaid and reseller (MVNO) customers not allowed on Verizon’s LTE network;
• Verizon’s proposed entry into the Canadian wireless market is primarily focused on serving southeastern Canada from roughly Montreal to Toronto;
• 60 percent of Verizon’s revenue declines in its enterprise division were due to the federal government’s sequestration — automatic spending cuts, and declining spending by state and local governments;
• Verizon has no interest in competing with AT&T to acquire Leap Wireless (Cricket);
• The impact of Verizon’s agreement with cable operators to sell each other’s products has underwhelmed, at least so far;
• Voice Over LTE service, which will dramatically improve sound quality on voice calls, will arrive in Verizon handsets later this year with an aim to introduce the service sometime in 2014. But Verizon Wireless wants to be certain 4G LTE coverage is robust, because if reception deteriorates, VoLTE calls are not backwards-compatible with its current CDMA network and the call will get dropped. Getting it right is more important for Verizon than getting the service out quickly.

Two former interns for Bell Mobility have filed complaints with Canada’s labor department alleging the company exploited an internship program to acquire the ultimate in cheap labor.

Jainna Patel, 24, spent five weeks at the wireless phone company’s intern campus in Missassauga, Ont. She was enrolled in Bell’s Professional Management Program (PMP), intended to expose workers to the fast-paced telecommunications industry. Patel expected to work with advanced wireless telecom technology and get an introduction to the industry over the course of the three or four-month program. Instead, she and other workers allege they were exposed to 12 hour days doing unpaid entry-level work including phone surveys and basic market research that directly benefited Bell and likely violated Canadian labor laws.

“It felt like I was sitting in an office as an employee, doing regular work. It didn’t feel like a sort of training program,” Patel told CBC News. “They just squeezed out of you every hour they could get and never showed any intent of paying.”

Bell’s PMP invites nearly 300 post-secondary graduates each year to work in the special facility, segregated from regular Bell employees.

Interns are allegedly pressured to work long hours and late, sometimes until 3am, and some left afraid to ask too many questions or complain.

Patel

One intern interviewed by the CBC said he lasted two months in the program and felt taken advantage of performing tedious market research that helped the company place cell towers and advertising billboards. He added he was chastised if he arrived late or complained about overtime hours.

He noted many interns had few opportunities in the jobs market, including at Bell, and many eventually returned to living at home, unemployed.

“I didn’t learn anything,” he said. “I learned not to trust corporations. I learned how life works. Anything I learned professionally was from the other interns.”

Toronto lawyer Andrew Langille, who specializes in internships and labor law, estimates the majority of the 300,000 unpaid interns working in Canada are performing work that directly benefits their host companies in violation of Canadian labor laws.

“Employers decided to use the poor economic conditions and the poor labor market as a carte blanche to begin replacing paid employees with unpaid ones,” Langille claims, noting he hears more complaints about Bell’s internship program than any other program in Canada.

“If you are out of school and you are just providing free work for an employer, then it is typically illegal,” said Langille.

But provincial laws often differ from federal law, opening up loopholes that some companies use to flout labor laws.

Bell’s Creekbank Campus in Ontario.

In Ontario, provincial regulated employers, which do not include Bell, must provide training that benefits the intern without reaping any benefit from the work the intern does. Bell, which is federally regulated, is covered by Canada’s looser Labour Code, which avoids spelling out specific rules governing internships. Case law and past precedent have provided some general guidance that employers should follow, including the fact almost all work should be compensated, but it remains less clear-cut.

Patel’s complaint asks Bell to compensate her almost $2,500 in unpaid wages for her work.

Patel also explained she felt intense pressure from Bell managers to stay quiet and not file any complaints against the program, which at least one manager suggested could be at risk if the government intervened. Patel was told that could result in hundreds of interns being sent home.

Langille was unmoved.

“Is it permissible that a company that makes billions of dollars each year in profits is not paying the minimum wage? It’s ridiculous. A lot of the companies that are using unpaid labor have the ability to pay but choose not to — to save money,” Langille said.

Patel is now back at home worried she will get blacklisted by the industry for being a troublemaker.

[flv width=”480″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC BC Bell accused of breaking labour law with unpaid interns 6-24-13.flv[/flv]

Jainna Patel talks with the CBC about her experience as an unpaid intern for Bell Mobility, Bell Canada’s wireless division. (3 minutes)

CenturyLink investors got the shock of their investment lives last week after company executives announced the phone company was slashing its dividend by 26 percent from 72.5 cents to 54 cents per share. The stock immediately tanked, tumbling the most in more than three decades, according to Bloomberg News.

The stock price crash wiped out about $6 billion in market value after the dividend cut was announced and stock analysts lambasted executives for the decision.

But CenturyLink’s move to stop paying out large sums to investors does not mean the company is going to spend the money on network and service upgrades. Instead, CenturyLink executives plan to spend $2 billion in stock purchase buybacks over the next two years.

“This is one of the most unusual capital allocation decisions I have ever seen,”  Todd Rethemeier, an analyst with Hudson Square Research in New York told Bloomberg.

CenturyLink, like Frontier Communications and Windstream, have all been popular “investment-grade” stocks for investors that rely on dividend payouts. Many investors explore various platforms for trading these stocks, often seeking resources that provide in-depth analyses, such as a Kraken review, to make informed decisions. All three phone companies have paid extremely high dividends to attract shareholder investment, but the ongoing decline in revenue from landline customers disconnecting service has made high dividend payouts financially untenable. CenturyLink has lost six percent of its landline customers in the 12 months ending last September, a decline of 857,000 lines. In the last two years, the dividend payout has cost CenturyLink 50-55 percent of its free cash flow. That is unsustainable at a time the company is losing upwards of $25 million in operating revenue every quarter.

From: Seeking Alpha

CenturyLink executives told shareholders in the company’s latest quarterly conference call that much of CenturyLink’s investment will continue to build fiber links to serve highly profitable cell towers. The company also plans to further expand its fiber-to-the-neighborhood service Prism, which works similarly to AT&T’s U-verse. Phoenix, Arizona is the company’s next major target for rollout, with the service already soft-launched in certain neighborhoods. But do not expect CenturyLink to begin a spending spree to expand Prism rapidly into other communities, even if it means losing more landline customers.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports CenturyLink, the city’s primary phone company, is now in a race against time in a country where more than a third of Americans rely on cellphones — a service CenturyLink does not provide. In response, CenturyLink has relied on its multi-platform Prism service, which can provide phone, broadband, and cable-TV in its bid to stay relevant and help improve earnings growth. The company also sees corporate customers as a major income source, and has expanded into the business of cloud computing with its acquisition of Savvis.

But the company has a more immediate potential challenge. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union representing as many as 13,000 CenturyLink employees, has authorized its executive board to set a strike date. The company’s labor contract expired in October and bargaining has yet to achieve a renewal. Workers are complaining about significant benefits cuts, especially to health care plans.