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AT&T Suggests To 300K Employees To Lobby the FCC
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."
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/
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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 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."
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.
blah blah blah
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.
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.
My webcomic
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.
There are examples of excesses, but you are proposing a solution that throws away the baby with the bathwater. You need to craft a fine balance between giving workers good conditions and ensuring the viability of the business. Unions will be part of this because business and governments have historically only acted in the wake of unions to improve conditions. Removing unions from the equation has historically resulted in lower wages, more injuries and deaths on the job, job insecurity and higher stress levels, all of which effect the quality of life in your country. While its easy to wax lyrical about the uselessness of unions from a secure financial position, try and imagine what life is like for an average worker in the early 20th century - that is where you go back if you remove unions.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"