T-Mobile Promised Major Job Growth Post Sprint Merger. SEC Filings Show The Exact Opposite Happened

from the Charlie-Brown-and-Lucy-Football dept

When T-Mobile was selling its $26 billion Sprint merger to regulators, it told anybody who'd listen that the deal would create a parade of new jobs. In a 2019 blog post that still hasn't been deleted (amateur move, guys), ex-T-Mobile CEO John Legere didn't mince words in his predictions:

"So, let me be really clear on this increasingly important topic. This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter. That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact."

"...These combined efforts will create nearly 5,600 new American customer care jobs by 2021."

2021 is here, and a recent SEC filing shows that the company has actually lost about 5,000 jobs in a little under a year and a half. That number could potentially be even higher. As noted last April, T-Mobile quickly set about immediately shuttering its Metro prepaid division (a decision that had nothing to do with COVID), resulting in an estimated 6,000 layoffs (something T-Mobile said wouldn't happen). Last June, the company fired hundreds of additional Sprint employees during a conference call that lasted all of six minutes.

There's likely more where that came from, as the company is still operating dual headquarters in both the Pacific Northwest and Overland Park, Kansas. In most mergers like this, the acquiring company tries to keep things the same for about a year to keep folks calm before the hatchets are unveiled.

Of course, this is all something that consumer groups, antitrust experts, unions, and even Wall Street stock jocks predicted. Most of those folks predicted that, even though it would take time, the deal would eliminate anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs. That's in addition to their complaints that the deal effectively reduced US wireless competition by 25% via 4-3 carrier consolidation, something that historically always, sooner or later, results in higher prices for consumers (see: Canada, Ireland, Germany).

Granted in his original blog post, Legere made fun of those critics and insisted they were simply making shit up:

"I guess if the real numbers don’t tell the story you want, you can just make up new ones? It’s actually offensive."

Yes, accurate predictions are so offensive. Granted John Legere, who successfully built T-Mobile from an also-ran into a major competitor (thanks in part to regulators blocking AT&T's 2011 merger with T-Mobile), was quick to leave the company shortly after the deal, offloading his Central Park West Penthouse to Giorgio Armani for $17.5 million (how many employee jobs is that?). And as Light Reading notes, T-Mobile's revenues continue to soar as it continues job cuts it promised wouldn't happen:

"In 2015, T-Mobile was making about $650,000 per employee. Last year, it generated almost $912,000. For workers at the company, that is not a source of comfort."

Granted this happens absolutely every time there's a major telecom merger. Companies throw out bullshit job growth claims, knowing full well such consolidation inevitably will result in massive job cuts a year or two later as redundant positions are eliminated. The press hypes the false merger "synergy" claims, then (usually) can't be bothered to follow up with reports highlighting how the promises were empty. It's a massive ouroboros of dysfunction, and no matter how many times we live through the exact same experience (AT&T's countless mergers, Verizon's countless mergers, Comcast's repeated mergers), America has a severe allergy to learning absolutely anything from experience.

Mindless consolidation and "growth for growth's sake" hurts employees, markets, and consumers. Full stop. Regulators could have forced Sprint to find another suitor, preferably one that didn't result in a loss of overall competitors (Dish, Comcast, Charter, Google, Amazon). Instead we signed off on another massive deal, based on a parade of false promises. Then, in two or three years when US wireless prices (already some of the highest in the developed world) are even higher, everybody will stand around with a dumb look on their faces wondering how exactly we got this point. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Filed Under: competition, hiring, jobs, john legere, lies, merger, mobile service
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Small Towns In Alaska Are Staffing Their Police Departments With Convicted Criminals

from the replacing-bad-cops-with-worse-cops dept

Hiring cops is hard work. That's probably why we're not exactly blessed with the best of the best. Over the past few years, police officer morale has been in a nosedive. As the public's awareness of police misconduct has increased (along with third-party footage of said misconduct), cops have discovered the job is no longer quite as fun as it used to be. Lots of power and zero accountability is a hell of a drug, but even that wears off eventually.

But cop shops still need cops, so hiring continues. Law enforcement agencies endlessly recycle fired officers, giving them unearned shots at redemption. Other agencies have just given up, hiring whoever walks through the door expressing interest in the position.

When the openings exceed the hiring pool, you get the mess being inflicted on the residents of Stebbins, Alaska. This horrifying report by Kyle Hopkins for ProPublica demonstrates just how low the bar can be set for new hires if your agency is desperate enough.

In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.

The current police chief pleaded guilty to throwing a teenage relative to the ground and threatening to kill her after drinking homebrew liquor in 2017. (Alcohol is illegal in the village.) He was hired a year later. He declined to answer questions in person and blocked a reporter on Facebook.

Two men who until recently were Stebbins police officers pleaded guilty to spitting in the faces of police officers; one was the subject of a 2017 sexual assault restraining order in which a mother said he exposed himself to her 12-year-old daughter.

Convicts are the new cops in Stebbins. But it's not just a Stebbins problem. All across Alaska, law enforcement agencies are understaffed. A third of Alaskan towns have no local cops at all. No cops might be the better choice. The ProPublica investigation found that at least 14 Alaskan cities employ officers with criminal records -- something that violates Department of Public Safety regulations. (It also violates common sense, but only the former can levy fines and enforce compliance.)

The most common convictions are for domestic violence. This is a problem that's inherent to law enforcement. Studies performed in the 1990s found that 40% of police officer families experienced domestic violence as compared to 10% of the rest of the population. There's very little reason to believe this has improved over the past 20 years. Law enforcement agencies simply do not punish officers who engage in domestic violence.

In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse…

[...]

[W]hile most officials say they treat domestic abuse by officers as they would any other form of misconduct, interviews and disciplinary records indicate that, in fact, punishment is often light and job loss uncommon.

Given this permissive environment, the situation may have gotten worse since these studies were performed. The most pessimistic take on ProPublica's investigation is that the only difference between the Stebbins police force and other law enforcement agencies is the number of domestic violence convictions.

Odds are, it's not going to get any better. The state's Department of Public Safety has basically given up on policing the state's police officers. It's also ceding its position, since zero oversight definitely won't improve the public's safety. This means vulnerable Alaskan communities will be all the more vulnerable for the foreseeable future.

In Mountain Village, population 864, one recent VPO [Village Police Officer] awaits trial on charges of stealing from a murder scene. Court records show five other recent VPOs in the same Yukon River community are awaiting hearings or have admitted to criminal charges including four counts of disorderly conduct, three counts of assault, two cases of neglect, two cases of drunken driving, two charges of harassment and three cases of domestic violence.

Along the Norton Sound coast, the city of Shaktoolik in May hired a VPO who has pleaded guilty to five assault charges within the past 10 years. “He was our only applicant so we had no other choice,” a city employee said.

Among those hired as TPOs in the fishing villages of Kasigluk and Tuntutuliak, located among the vast web of river-fed lakes in western Alaska, are registered sex offenders who admitted to abuse of a minor or attempted sexual abuse of a minor.

There's nothing in these jobs that attracts good people, much less great people. It mainly attracts people who can't find work elsewhere because of their criminal records. But police departments are willing to overlook this just to keep the positions filled. This isn't an acceptable compromise. The entity standing between the Alaskan public and the police has failed to hold the line and the state's taxpayers will continue to pay for a problem the state's not willing to fix.

Filed Under: alaska, criminals, hiring, police

The NYPD Can't Hire Black Officers Because It's Hassled Too Many Black Men

from the sabotaged-by-its-own-policing dept

You can't build a better police force if you can't get anybody to apply for the job. Perhaps this partially explains the hesitance of law enforcement agencies to rid themselves of badly-behaving officers. Without a healthy pool of potential hires to pull from, attrition can become a real problem.

Many people are dissuaded from pursuing law enforcement careers after negative interactions with officers. This is where agencies are hurting themselves. Racism in law enforcement is a problem that can't be ignored. Some of it is overt. And some of it is the only conclusion you can draw when incidents like the following occur.

Twelve McKinney, TX, police officers responded to a complaint about teens at a local, private pool. Like too many interactions, it escalated far too quickly, beginning with Officer Eric "Barrel Roll" Casebolt (who has since resigned) tumbling into the frame of the cell phone video before yelling at/cuffing anything black, culminating in him throwing a 14-year-old black girl to the ground and sitting on her, only momentarily interrupted by him chasing off two black teens who tried to come to her aid by pointing his pistol at them.

The teen who recorded this incident was white. No orders were ever yelled at him, despite him being close to the action and openly recording Casebolt's one-man raid. (If anyone can explain Big & Khaki's purpose/position in this incident, I'd love to hear it.) What was actually in the heart and mind of Officer Casebolt we'll never know. But we can certainly see what it looks like. And what it looks like is black=bad and everyone else of other races not worth giving a second look.

If this mindset -- or this appearance -- is ever going to change, there needs to be some more diversity in the police workforce. I'm not suggesting another mutation of affirmative action, but it would probably help community relations if responding officers had a bit more in common with those they're policing. As was noted in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, minorities were routinely being charged with the pettiest of violations (and arrested when fines weren't paid) by a police force that was predominantly white. In many other cases, it's been pointed out that many police forces not only do not mesh with the racial makeup of their communities, but often live miles away from the places they patrol -- distancing themselves both literally and figuratively from the people they serve.

In New York City, years of "broken windows" policing and stop-and-frisk tactics have combined to ensure its force won't be less white nor less disconnected from the communities the officers patrol, at least not for the forseeable future.

Commissioner William Bratton is blunt about probable causes. “We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them,” he said in a 20 May interview. Because many black men have been convicted of a felony, they are automatically disqualified.

This is a problem -- not just for the NYPD -- but for policing as a whole. Bratton (who has since clarified this remark -- more on that in a bit) is going to have trouble finding minority officers because his force spent most of the last 25 years either busting them for petty crimes (the "broken windows") or shoving them up against the nearest wall for suspicionless questionings and patdowns. Those who could make a positive impact due to their rapport with the communities they serve (because they grew up/live there) are already disqualified from serving.

As noted, Bratton has clarified this statement:

Bratton said that when he had raised the “unfortunate consequences” of an explosion in stop-and-frisk tactics as one of the factors behind a difficulty in recruiting African American officers, he had meant that being the subject of such stops could discourage black people from applying.

“Stop, question and frisk is not preventing people from coming on the job,” Bratton said on Wednesday. “It’s not something that prohibits them. What it might do, however, because of a negative interaction with a New York City police officer – why would they want to become a New York City cop when they feel that they’ve been inappropriately dealt with in stop, question and frisk?”

While this points out that summons and misdemeanor charges won't keep black men from joining the NYPD, it doesn't make things much better. In fact, given the pervasiveness of stop-and-frisk, it possibly makes things worse. Rather than just disqualifying felons, it has alienated thousands more who were never arrested or charged. Their only interactions with the NYPD have been of the "hassled" variety -- stopped, patted down and questioned simply for being black, young and living in their own neighborhoods.

Now that stop-and-frisk has been dialed back significantly (only 48,000 last year -- compared to 4 million stops from 2002-2013), there's a chance this may, at some point in the future, pose less of a problem. This unconstitutional program -- in addition to alienating black applicants -- decimated the NYPD applicant pool for several years before someone finally realized what was happening.

Bratton said on Wednesday that at one time, police department applications had included a question about whether the applicant had ever been the subject of stop-and-frisk. But answering “yes” would not have disqualified the applicant, he said.

“We changed that question,” Bratton said at the press conference. “They were asked starting in 2009 and 10, ‘Have you been, basically the subject of a stop?’ We took a look at that as part of the changes we were making as part of the overall stop, question and frisk program. We changed that question. Because really it was not a qualifier ... It’s really information that’s of no use or value to us in the application process.”

Nearly 400,000 stops a year means tossing out tons of applications, presuming even a small percentage of those stopped weren't already deterred from entering the police force thanks to these largely-negative interactions.

But this isn't just an NYPD problem. It's a problem for all police forces who spend most of their time coming down hard on minorities by enforcing petty ordinances to the nth degree or doing what Officer Casebolt did in the above situation -- "busting" black kids while whites and other minorities roamed free. If this sort of thing remains unchecked, hiring policies alone will prevent police forces from being more representative of the communities they serve. Left untouched, this will result in more and more agencies becoming predominantly composed of white officers, even as the population being policed remains a blend of minorities.

On top of any present racism (something unavoidable when hiring humans), the increasingly homogeneous police force will only exacerbate "us vs. them" thinking, as hired officers will be pulled from a pool of people who've never experienced the negative aspects of law enforcement.

The fix isn't Affirmative-Action-on-steroids. The solution is the elimination of tactics that lend themselves to racist behavior and further drive a wedge between the policed and the police. The only way to ensure you can get the best -- and most useful -- police officers is to stop preemptively culling your potential workforce with abusive behavior and policies. Internal housecleaning is also in order, but what the NYPD's experience shows is that bad policies lead to the continued deterioration of the police force… which leads to the continued deterioration of policework… and so on, until your police force bears almost no resemblance to the communities it polices.

Filed Under: hiring, nypd, race, stop and frisk

Big Tech Companies Agree To Pay Up Over Hiring Collusion

from the as-they-should dept

Last month, we pointed out that Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel would almost certainly settle, rather than face an ongoing lawsuit concerning their collusive hiring practices, in which they promised not to poach employees from one another in an effort to keep employees longer and (more importantly for them) to keep salaries down. That has now come to pass, with the four companies agreeing to pay out $324 million to settle the charges. This is good. As we noted in our original story, the hiring collusion was shameful and, worse, antithetical to the kind of job shifting and idea sharing that helped make Silicon Valley into Silicon Valley.

For many years, I've given a series of talks (often to foreign executives and government officials) about why Silicon Valley turned into Silicon Valley. Everyone assumes it's the obvious stuff about lots of venture capital or access to good colleges. And so they try to mimic that, back where they came from. But as you dig down into the Silicon Valley story, you quickly realize that, while those things helped, the true secret sauce is the easy job mobility here, with people constantly shifting jobs -- and sharing ideas across many different companies. What comes out of that is more innovation and the important big breakthroughs that have made this entire industry possible. A few top execs, led by Steve Jobs, tried to throw sand in those wheels, stupidly believing that it was more important to protect poaching of their own employees, ignoring how that also limited their own ability to cross-fertilize ideas and bring in top performers from other companies.

The history of Silicon Valley is littered with stories of job hopping, employment diasporas and the like. Look at how many successful companies that were formed in the past decade have some connection to PayPal, for example. Easy job mobility is a key factor in Silicon Valley to allow innovation to happen, and hopefully this ugly incident puts the issue behind the tech industry, and they can go back to actually innovating.

Filed Under: collusion, hiring, poaching, tech companies
Companies: adobe, apple, google, intel

Apple, Google, Adobe And Intel Have To Face The Music Over Collusive Hiring Practices

from the good dept

It's been nearly five years since we wrote about a DOJ investigation into collusive activity between a number of technology giants, in which the companies basically agreed not to poach employees from one another in an effort to keep salaries and employee turnover down. As the details have come out over the years, they've looked worse and worse, with Steve Jobs acting as sort of a ring leader -- or really more of a mob boss -- threatening retaliation (via patent infringement lawsuits) against companies that didn't obey the "rules." It's one thing to want to be careful about hiring practices to avoid angering a partner, but it's quite another to set up an official agreed-upon policy between a bunch of companies not to go after certain employees.

While some companies have already settled (and a few others likely involved in the agreements have so far escaped lawsuits), Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel have been trying to get a class action lawsuit built off of the DOJ's efforts thrown out. That effort failed on Friday, meaning that it's likely that these four remaining companies will try to work out a settlement, rather than go through a full trial.

As we've discussed for years, part of what actually made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is the ease with which employees could switch jobs, often between competitors. Multiple studies have made it clear that greater job switching within an innovative industry is actually much better for that entire industry. With job shifting comes important cross-fertilization of ideas, allowing the bigger breakthroughs to happen faster, opening up new opportunities. Without that kind of job shifting, knowledge gets stuffed into silos, and overall innovation gets held back and stymied. In fact, if you look at the success of basically all four of the companies in this lawsuit, you can point to evidence of how the easy shifting of jobs was a key part of important breakthroughs that created tremendous opportunities and innovations (hell, two of the three members of Intel's founding team were once part of the traitorous eight, who left Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor -- only to go on to form Intel, AMD and a bunch of others). Job hopping, poaching employees and the like often get a bad reputation, but the research is pretty clear that it was a key factor (according to some, the key factor) in allowing Silicon Valley to become a hub of innovation.

Hopefully, the end result of the DOJ efforts and these class action lawsuits is to maintain an innovation economy where job hopping and information sharing is empowered, rather than hindered.

Filed Under: anti-poaching agreements, collusion, hiring, innovation, silicon valley, steve jobs, technology
Companies: adobe, apple, google, intel

State Department Telling Students Who Apply For Jobs That If They Mention Wikileaks On Twitter, They Won't Be Hired

from the head-in-sand dept

It appears that the State Department really wants to put its head in the sand when it comes to the whole Wikileaks' release of diplomatic cables. Mathew Ingram points us to the news that a career services person at Columbia University apparently sent around an email, purportedly concerning a conversation they'd had with an alumnus at the State Department warning students who wanted to work in the State Department to ignore Wikileaks. Specifically, it said that, as part of the background check on you, the State Department would review your social networking accounts, like Twitter and Facebook, and if they saw you had talked about Wikileaks, they might think you couldn't handle confidential information:

From: "Office of Career Services"

Date: November 30, 2010 15:26:53 EST

Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,
Office of Career Services

Assuming this is accurate (and it may prove not to be...), it's difficult to think of a much more ridiculous response. Talking about what's going on with Wikileaks is hardly an indication of how one deals with confidential information, because that information is no longer confidential. Pretending that you shouldn't even discuss a rather important and topical story of interest to those who actually do care about diplomacy and public policy, isn't just a "put your head in the sand" approach, it's actively discouraging the folks who might have the most insight and interest into these subjects from getting a job where they might be of assistance.

Filed Under: hiring, social networks, state department, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Is It An Antitrust Violation To Agree Not To Poach Employees From Competitors?

from the not-entirely-clear dept

The news broke this week that a bunch of big name Silicon Valley companies are under investigation by the Justice Department for their hiring practices and potential antitrust concerns. The specific issue appears to be that the companies may have agreed to not try to poach top execs from certain companies. Apparently there was nothing stopping the employee from getting a job at one of these companies, if they took the initiative -- but the companies wouldn't initiate the attempt. In most cases, the idea was not to poach from partners -- which might just be good business sense (pissing off partners generally isn't a good idea). Where it gets tricky is the accusation that some companies had written agreements not to poach, which could lead to some charges of collusion. Oddly, the NY Times article's title claims that the issue is "unwritten rules" when the details of the article suggest it's not the unwritten, but the written rules that are the problem. There have been studies that suggest that root of Silicon Valley's success was the easy movement of people from job to job -- so if it's true that companies are holding back trying to get the best employees to move around, they may actually be doing a lot more harm to themselves anyway. And, on the whole, it does seem like there's an awful lot of movement between big name companies. Just this week at the Conversational Marketing Summit, one of the speakers had a musical chairs presentation that went on for a long time showing a bunch of execs and how they played musical chairs between Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, News Corp. and Facebook.

Filed Under: antitrust, collusion, hiring, silicon valley
Companies: apple, genentech, google, microsoft, yahoo

Motorola Trying To Block Competitors From Hiring Workers It Laid Off

from the insult-to-injury dept

We already think that noncompete agreements don't make sense for companies, but Motorola may be taking the concept to a new level. Rather than trying to stop employees from leaving Motorola to go to a competitor, it's now trying to stop employees it already laid off from going to work for RIM. Motorola had already sued RIM earlier this year for trying to entice employees to jump ship, and this followed another suit by Motorola against Apple for hiring away an exec. Maybe rather than trying to prevent employees from going elsewhere, Motorola might want to focus on improving its own offerings and its own working conditions so that this isn't even a problem? But if it's laying people off, it seems rather ridiculous to then try to stop them from joining another company.

Filed Under: hiring, laid off, noncompetes
Companies: motorola, rim

We're Hiring In Sales

from the brief-programming-note dept

As we continue to evolve and grow our business, we've been looking to hire an experienced sales exec to focus on selling the Insight Community. We've been interviewing a variety of candidates, but wanted to alert the wider Techdirt community, as we know that readers here are most likely to understand what we're trying to achieve. If you're an experienced sales exec and believe in what we're doing here, feel free to contact us. Alternatively, if you know of any good candidates, please feel free to send them the job description.

Filed Under: hiring, sales
Companies: floor64, techdirt

IBM Seeks Patent For Biosensor-Based Hiring

from the taylorism-is-back... dept

theodp writes "A just-published IBM patent application for Optimizing Utilization of a Donor describes how to monitor 'the somatic (i.e. physical) and affective (i.e. emotional) states of human resources' to determine 'an optimal allocation of the human resources to tasks.' IBM further explains that 'the emotional and physical states may be sensed via non-invasive biosensors.' And what exactly will be measured and sensed? Physical condition can be determined by measuring 'the level of blood sugar, the blood heat, or the like.' And clues to 'a human resource's mood to perform a job with lust, joy or any other emotional condition' can be found by looking at 'changes in autonomic functions, such as, for example, heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, sweating, trembling, and other features like hormonal changes; changes in body temperature; and changes in neural function that are measurable.' So if you want that job with Big Blue, perhaps you better make sure that your Blood Pressure, Pulse, Mood, and Level of Fatigue are as up-to-snuff as your skills. Yikes."

This sounds like the modern equivalent of Taylorism, which never faired all that well in the first place. Effectively, this sounds like simply applying modern technologies to a typical Taylor-like review of a worker.

Filed Under: biosensor, hiring, hr, patent
Companies: ibm