Union Slams Frontier For Fiber Mess

Communication workers and labor-friendly politicians called out Frontier Communications for prioritizing underqualified subcontractors over full-time, well-trained employees as the telecommunications giant expands its fiber optic Internet services across the state.

That was the message of a Thursday morning press conference outside of Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 1298’s union home at 3055 Dixwell Ave. in Hamden. 

Roughly 30 union members were joined by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, State Sens. Jeorge Cabrera and Matt Lesser, State Rep. Josh Elliott, and Mayor Lauren Garrett in calling on Frontier to learn from its recent mistakes and move towards higher quality Internet service by investing in its full-time workforce. 

The press conference came roughly a month after Connecticut utility regulators fined Frontier $5 million for​“jeopardizing public safety through reckless and inappropriate underground installations” of fiber-optic cables in the public right-of-way in the state. It also came several weeks after Frontier sold its Orange Street office building for over $73 million and then signed a 20-year lease with its new New Jersey-based landlord.

David Weidlich Jr., the president of Local 1298, recalled on Thursday that when Frontier acquired AT&T’s Connecticut broadband services in 2014, the company ​“promised to grow the business and to grow jobs.”

Instead, Weidlich said, he watched as the number of union members shrank from 2,200 to 1,500 over the course of less than a decade.

Call center jobs, engineering jobs, fiber placement, fiber splicing, and pole maintenance jobs have all been subcontracted en masse to outside employees willing to work for cheaper rates, he said. 

“Each of these separate contractors, they can be bossed around by the hedge funds, they can be exploited by the millionaires and the billionaires who just wanna make more money,” Blumenthal said upon taking the podium.

Blumenthal tied the argument that subcontractors are often under-trained and less dedicated than full-time workers to recent findings that Frontier damaged underground natural gas and electric distribution facilities — jeopardizing both the health and safety of the general public and workers involved — while deploying fiber optic cables. 

Read the report filed by Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority which resulted in Frontier getting hit with a $5 million fine here.

“A check has been written,” Blumenthal stated. ​“They didn’t even ask for a hearing.”

“We invested $65 billion [in internet for all] in the bipartisan infrastructure act,” Blumenthal said. ​“It’s not just $65 billion to be thrown out to whoever… It’s gotta be quality.”

“Those kinds of contractors coming out of state,” he asserted — the kinds that ​“cut corners,” as did those who cost Frontier millions — ​“are no substitute for Connecticut workers, union workers, who do the job right.”

Ed Hawthorne, the president of the Connecticut American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) said that ​“Frontier is choosing the short sided path of using cheap, out-of-state contractors who disregard our laws and threaten the reliability of Connecticut’s vital infrastructure.”

“Every employer should strive to have a dedicated workforce that cares about the community they serve… and use workers from that very community, because those workers are the ones who care about the community that they live in.”

Frontier: "All Of The Above" Strategy Needed

Reached for comment on Thursday, Frontier Communications spokesperson Chrissy Murray told the Independent that a nationwide labor shortage, short duration of fiber build-out work, and the necessity to rent out equipment and vehicles all explain Frontier’s reliance on subcontracted work. 

She wrote in an email to the Independent that ​“Frontier is delivering a critical communications service to communities across the country and we’re creating jobs along the way. As we move from town to town, we supplement our workforce with external partners to fill temporary staffing needs and help us quickly deliver on the growing demand for our service. We’re building fiber across the country with a mix of employees and external partners.”

“Given the labor shortage across the country, we need an ​‘all of the above’ strategy where we are hiring employees and external partners. We’re aggressively recruiting to fill hundreds of open techs roles. These roles sit empty because of the difficulty in finding skilled workers. For the fiber build roles, we have to use external partners to meet consumer demand for this critical service. We’ve recently tripled our referral bonus to recruit new techs in expansion markets like Connecticut to help our recruiting efforts.”

She claimed that Frontier’s building is ​“moving quickly across the country with demand for this critical service at an all-time high. That means that some of the construction work is often temporary as the fiber build moves from town to town and state to state. It wouldn’t be fair to hire employees for a short period of time or ask them to leave their families every time our build moves. That’s why it’s industry standard to hire external partners for some of this work.”

She also pointed to ​“a nationwide shortage of vehicles and equipment,” which she said has prompted the company to rely on subcontractors.

“Our goal is to build fiber in Connecticut and give people the fastest, most reliable service as quickly as possible. It is necessary to supplement the build with partners who have this expertise and equipment to build in order to meet the growing demand for our Fiber and to do so in the most efficient way possible.”

Finally, Murray denied that subcontracted work means lower quality labor than union employees can provide: ​“Everyone working on our fiber build is held to the same high standards and we have processes in place to manage quality control – whether they are full time employees or contractors,” she concluded.

At Call Center, Wait Times Getting Longer & Longer

As Weidlich made clear, the workers’ complaints went beyond the implications of the PURA report and fiber placement jobs.

Nikki F., who declined to give her last name, has worked in Frontier (and, previously, AT&T’s call center) for 18 years. 

“They reduced our workforce in Connecticut and have not hired any new employees,” she said. The result, she reflected, is ​“hour long hold times,” meaning ​“angry customers” and heightened stress for Frontier employees running company operations, and mandatory overtime.

Nikki said she now usually works an extra eight hours a week due to a lack of competent, full-time staff, meaning less time with her 12-year-old son and more time at work: ​“It’s a poor work life balance,” she summed up.

Weidlich (pictured in his office above) said that he believed Frontier needs to hire more union workers as soon as possible not just to compensate for current labor shortages or issues, but to address the reality that nearly a third of the union’s current members are retirement eligible.

After 38 years working with the same company and 22 years serving on the executive board of the union — which was founded in 1937 when members were working for The Southern New England Telephone Company — Weidlich said the future of Frontier is looking down: ​“They don’t have a plan for attrition.” 

See below for a video put together by the CWA union for their newly launched campaign against Frontier.

Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.