- Broadband jobs are "less safe than they used to be," said CWA's Ceilidh Gao
- CWA's new "report card" graded broadband projects on how well they incorporated transparency, equity and labor standards
- Projects that offered union representation, local employment opportunities and prevailing wages scored higher in CWA's books
We hear a lot of talk from the broadband industry about how there’s a labor shortage. But there’s not so much a labor shortage as there is “a shortage of good jobs,” according to Ceilidh Gao, senior research associate at Communication Workers of America (CWA).
Wages “have gone down in recent decades” and the jobs are “less safe than they used to be,” she told Fierce. ISPs also often subcontract work to companies that didn’t receive public broadband funding, hindering the accountability of work conditions.
“Oftentimes these companies…are not incentivized to do safe work,” Gao said. “They’re being paid by the project, they may be rushed. And when a state or locality discovers problems with the poles, with installation, this company is often long gone.”
To put these issues on the radar, CWA published a “report card” that graded fourteen county-level broadband projects on how well they incorporated transparency, equity and labor standards.
These projects were funded by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), but CWA’s report also aims to advise states on what to do (and what not to do) for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.
Of course, the rules for ARPA and BEAD aren’t identical. BEAD for instance “has more labor requirements in it for what states have to do compared to the American Rescue Plan dollars,” said Gao, as well as “different process and accountability mechanisms.”
However, CWA found “good labor practices correlated with other favorable aspects of good public spending – something to keep in mind for when states work on BEAD projects.
Here’s a breakdown of the criteria CWA looked at:
- Transparency (public disclosure of project information, public participation in the county’s use of funding)
- Equity (type of broadband technology offered, whether a provider had a matching contribution, participation in ACP or alternative subsidy program)
- Labor standards (union representation, prevailing wages, local employment opportunities, if a provider used a directly employed workforce)
Which counties came out on top?
The highest scoring project was in Kenton County, Kentucky, with 20 points (the maximum a project can receive), followed by Beaver County, Pennsylvania, with 18 points.
Although the ARPA money came from one federal pot, what was interesting was that there was “a big diversity in how they played out in local communities,” said Gao.
Kenton County partnered with altafiber, which contributed $30 million to the county’s $10.8 million ARPA funding. Altafiber is a union-represented company and used a union-represented subcontractor for most of the construction work it outsourced, so the project received a high score in labor standards.
“You can’t separate labor practices and a well-trained workforce from other factors to think of in a well-run public project,” said Gao. “If you want a project to be a good investment of public dollars, it’s going to create long-lasting, quality infrastructure and it’s going to be done in a way that’s safe for the public and other workers.”
Additionally, the Kenton County fiber project agreement was available online and the county provided frequent updates in public meetings about the project’s timeline as well as a map of affected addresses.
The Beaver County project, which partnered with Verizon, scored highly in every category except transparency measures. Although the contract was available publicly, only one meeting publicly discussed the project, suggesting that “public officials have little ongoing oversight of the work,” according to CWA.
Each locality handles the public posting of documents in different ways, Gao pointed out, or can only devote a certain number of resources to FOIA requests.
Still, CWA is pushing for more transparency at the state level.
“In the BEAD program and other places, we see companies commit to certain kinds of infrastructure, certain kinds of labor commitments,” she said.
“But it’s very hard for the public to hold those companies accountable” if there’s no transparency about those commitments.
And here's who faced shortcomings
On the flip side, Georgia’s Newton County and West Virginia’s Putnam County were the lowest-scoring projects, earning four and six points, respectively.
Notably, Newton County received no points in the Public Participation subcategory. The only information available about the project was the funding – neither the contract nor the project timeline was publicly available. The provider, Paladin Wireless, built only fixed wireless and did not contribute any funds to the project.
Because most counties using ARPA funds chose fiber for their deployments, there weren’t that many fixed wireless projects to evaluate, CWA noted. But those projects scored lower in the equity measures category due to the broadband technology type.
Why might a provider not contribute any matching funds? It really depends on what the market is like in a particular state, Gao said, “and what kind of providers one can attract within the competitive process.”
If there’s no “economic case for a higher match, that might be an example why a locality or state might have that kind of allowance in how they design their program,” she said.
In Putnam County’s case, provider Mountain State Fiber also didn’t contribute funds (but its parent company Alpha Technologies is classified as a disadvantaged business, the report noted) and very little information about the project was available publicly. However, the project did receive points for building fiber and paying prevailing wages to workers.