AT&T Suggests To 300K Employees To Lobby the FCC 239
Several readers sent in the news that AT&T's top lobbyist sent a letter to all 300,000 employees urging them to give feedback to the FCC as it gears up for rulemaking on net neutrality. He even supplied talking points approved by the PR department. The lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, suggested that employees use their personal email accounts when they weigh in with the FCC. Pro-net-neutrality group Free Press has now likened Cicconi's letter to astroturfing: "Coming from one of the company’s most senior executives, it’s hard to imagine AT&T employees thinking the memo was merely a suggestion."
Let the FCC know your own opinion (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T urged its employees to post on the FCC's net neutrality website. You can do the same, you have until Thursday to post.
http://openinternet.gov/ [openinternet.gov]
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
Who needs to blatantly hinge jobs upon action/inaction to the letter when FUD inside the letter works so well?
Whatever, though. This is just like unions telling their members to do the same thing for the benefit of their employers (and thus themselves)... just without the go-between of the union. It happens all the time.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice, but here we're not talking about letters to your Congressional representative, we're talking about comments to be filed as part of a formal FCC rulemaking process. Comments filed in a formal rulemaking process are public records. In fact, the FCC has an online search system [fcc.gov] that lets you search all filed comments, by, among other things, the name of the person or entity filing the comment, and the results include additional information like the mailing address of the filer.
Consequently, especially if you are only worried about positive confirmation (IOW, if you don't mind some false negatives, but want to be fairly immune to false positives), its pretty easy for an employer to check if their employees have followed through on such a "recommendation."
Re:Scummy... (Score:3, Informative)
FTA:
Cicconi explained how employees could use a personal e-mail account to post comments on the FCC's net neutrality Web site to about the rules.
Double Standard? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes and no (Score:3, Informative)
"Coming from one of the company’s most senior executives, it’s hard to imagine AT&T employees thinking the memo was merely a suggestion."
We get periodic emails along similar lines, couched as suggestions, in the large bank in which I am a cog. Know what happens? The vast majority of our 10s of thousands of employees just ignore them. They often get lost in the daily email noise. I suspect that the people at AT&T are no different. And surprise! no repercussions, because they /are/ just suggestions.
I don't like this in any way (it also irritates me when they do it at work), but to imply that people are somehow being coerced into actually doing as stated in the email it is its own kind of aggravating. Try to give us drones some credit, eh?
Now pardon me, I've got to go -- I almost forgot to write out my monthly check to our PAC!
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
all true. I worked for the company in question for years and this is nothing new. Before net neutrality, there was cable vs dsl. Before that, there was UNE-P (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/UNE_P.html). Before that, there was SBC vs ATT for long distance. Before that, there was probably some other bogeyman that they tried to rally everyone against.
Here's the thing: I never once contributed to their PAC. Not even once. I didn't use Cingular, I used a competing carrier until Cingular's service got better than the competition. I still use an AT&T DSL connection and phone service, even though I no longer work there. Why? I will choose to spend my money on whomever provides the best service at my price point. I made that clear to everyone I used to work with who gave me grief.
My job was never once threatened. I never received a bad review, never got any flack at all. I left of my own volition. Now, if I still worked there, I would never do what they are asking. I don't think there would be trouble over that.
The sad part is, though, many many many of those 300K employees *will* allow themselves be coerced to send this email, even without understanding what the fuss is about. This is more about people doing what they are told than some corporation "encouraging" employees to vote a certain way. That happens everywhere, and it's not fair to stick it to AT&T over this as though they are doing something unusual and outrageous. It's the mindless mass of people who go along with this, despite the fact that any implicit threat is empty. Any thinking person would realize that there's nothing they can really do about it.
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:4, Informative)
Unions are a democracy.
Business are a dictatorship.
When a union tells its members, "You should do X," you can work on changing the direction of the Union by voting in new leadership, or run for a position yourself.
When a business tells its employees, "You should do X," you can quit.
Things look very, very bad (Score:5, Informative)
The free and open part of it is the best thing going. Please do not screw it up with regulations like the net neutrality proposal.
People have no clue what net neutrality is, and just assume it's government regulation that will make things worse. Hopefully some influential people on our side reads those comments and understands what these people really mean. Otherwise the overwhelming majority of responses are against net neutrality, which is not the kind of backing we want the big corps to have.
Re:Always err on the side of reducing power (Score:3, Informative)
Because people have posted a bunch of fear-laden scenarios about what might happen, but have not actually come to pass?
What, like blocking users who download too much then refusing to admit it even after tools are produced to show that Comcast was generating spoofed RST packets? Oh no, that would never come to pass.
Anytime a major ISP has tried something fishy they have been slapped down hard by customers.
Last I heard, Sandvine is doing pretty good... oh wait, the people whose applications stop working aren't Sandvine's customers.
The reason this is going to happen is the same reason that health reform is happening: no matter how much FUD the opponents throw out there, their FUD can't hold a candle to the reality of how it is now. "Oh no, nobody will invest in teh terabitz intarwebs!" but hey, at least Comcast won't be able to block me from using Lotus Notes [arstechnica.com].
Sure, there are good reasons not to change the regulation on either, but the industries are trying their damnedest to make sure that everyone knows the reasons why we should. You'd think that with health care reform breathing down their necks, insurers would take a timeout on refusing coverage due to unrelated issues [cnn.com], but no, as far as I can tell, they're fanning the flames to ensure that they'll have the hottest funeral pyres around.
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
How are you liking that 40 hour work week?
How about Maternity Leave?
What about the ability to take sick time when your kids is sick?
Unions fought for every one of these things and more. Unions make things better for working people.
I am not, nor have ever been part of a union. I just like the idea of democracy in the work place.
Re:Always err on the side of reducing power (Score:3, Informative)
Continuing with more evidence that all this and more has "come to pass":
Vonage and other VoIP providers had more than one ISP prevent customers from receiving the services they were paying for until the government stepped in. [zdnet.com]
BT replacing charities' web advertisements with their own [slashdot.org]. Charities! Why don't they just eat warm puppies fresh from the oven while they're at it? The least they could have done was replace those "punch the monkey" ads or seizure inducing "you've won!" ads.
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:0, Informative)
How do you like paying thousands of dollars more for an automobile because "it's unfair to make us pay ANY part of our health care costs, even though it costs the company twice as much now"?
How do you like being forced to keep a less-productive worker, simply because they have more seniority?
How do you like paying someone to stay home for YEARS, not actually doing any work for a company? I know a number of auto maker machinists that were paid to stay home for two years.
In Philly, thousands of feet of useless piping had to be installed in Comcast's new building because Plumbers Union Local 690 "raised a stink" (literally) since the building owners were using waterless urinals (which, by their own statements, do not like them SIMPLY because they require less L&M to install).
How do you like paying $40k/yr for someone to sweep the floor? That's the lowest rate for many of the unions around here.
Unions have outlived their usefulness. Now they are examples of the most greedy and corrupt organizations in country.
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
No, Our Managers aren't Tracking Our Responses (Score:1, Informative)
I'm posting anonymously here - if you want me to give you AT&T's official corporate opinion, I can point you to the PR department or the web site, and I'm not wearing a suit and tie and wielding a +3 Impressive Title right now. This is strictly my personal opinions, which only agree with the company's opinions when the company's right.
Our managers aren't tracking whether we've sent in our letters to the FCC. It's not even like the level of pressure we used to get for contributing to The United Way back in the day. And they really really don't want 300,000 people sending in opinions that claim to be AT&T's; they've had enough trouble with Ed Whitacre making that speech a few years ago about Google hogging the tubes that kick-started this mess.
Whether we get to remain employed is another matter entirely - Moore's Law means that equipment becomes more and more powerful, and can do more work with less management than ever, and while the telecom industry may not be diving over the cliff as aggressively as we were back in 2002 (between the Internet bust and the 9/11-caused decline in travel and therefore in 800-number call-center calling, which was a high-value cash cow) we're still pretty much used to annual layoffs.
Re:Please People, You're Spreading Misinformation (Score:4, Informative)
Unions are a democracy.
No, they are not. They are just a smaller version of the government, as corrupt and as filthy as them. There was a time when Unions were useful, those days are gone.
Re:Not entirely the same (Score:1, Informative)
I don't know that it is that cut and dried.
With some quick research (IANAL) I have come up with some information on exceptions to the "at will" ruling. Of course it varies by state and many times comes down to matters of public policy rather than codified law, but also brigs into qestion rights guaranteed by state constitutions
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/01/art1full.pdf
According to Wikipedia, under common-law an employer can not ask you to do something "illegal or immoral", and should not fire you for refusing. The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, which conversely implies the freedom to not speak. Forcing employees to wright a letter under pain of job loss seems rather immoral to me and a violation of civil rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment#Specific_states
Some states, such as New York, prohibit firings for political activities outside of work. This seems like a good example of that.
http://www.labor.state.ny.us/workerprotection/laborstandards/faq.shtm#14
The final issue that springs to mind is one of proper compensation. If an employee is required to perform a job function on their own time or using their personal property, they must be compensated for that. It the employer is not willing to compensate for use of personal time or property, then they can not legally fire someone for refusing.