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Communications Workers: Florida Public Utility Commission Ruling Will Worsen the Telecom Meltdown, S

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Communications Workers of America blasted yesterday's action by the Florida Public Service Commission to slash revenues that the regional Bell phone companies are able to collect from competitors who use their local networks.

"This is bad public policy that can only exacerbate the meltdown of the telecom industry by creating even more job losses. It will also discourage investment and job creation in the state of Florida and curb high-speed Internet roll-out,” said CWA President Morton Bahr.

Pointing out that the local carriers such as Bell South and Verizon/GTE in many cases are forced to provide phone lines to resellers at prices even below their own cost, Bahr stated: “The companies that build the nation's infrastructure are being penalized and stifled while competitors that build nothing and invent nothing are subsidized. This is not capitalism and it is not true marketplace competition.”

The Florida PUC's ruling would lower wholesale rates that local carriers charge their competitors by an additional 25 to 30 percent.

Regulatory rulings providing cheap access to the phone networks, imposed after the 1996 Telecommunications Act, have cost the regional Bells millions of phone lines and tens of thousands of jobs. Analysts predict that the phone companies will have lost 12 percent of the local market to resellers by the end of next year.

“Current policy might artificially create lower phone rates for the short-term, but the public is going to pay the price through stifled economic investment and the social cost of on-going job losses in an industry that has already been devastated,” Bahr said.

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