T-Mobile is backtracking on its promise to create 1,000 new jobs at a customer service center to be built in Kingsburg, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
The COVID-19 crisis “makes the imposition of a mandate to create additional jobs infeasible and unwarranted.” — T-Mobile
On Tuesday, T-Mobile said in a filing with the California Public Utilities Commission that the COVID-19 crisis “makes the imposition of a mandate to create additional jobs infeasible and unwarranted.”
Kingsburg Selected for Service Center in 2019
In April 2019, T-Mobile announced it had chosen the Kingsburg area for a “Customer Experience Center.” The company said that positions would pay salaries averaging at least 50% more than the Fresno County average.
T-Mobile made the job-hiring commitment as part of negotiations for approval to buy smaller rival Sprint Corp for $26.5 billion.
California was the last state to bless the union. It gave conditional approval to the merger in mid-April in a settlement announced by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
Before the settlement, Becerra had argued that the merger was unlawful and would lead to reduced competition and increased prices for consumers.
But, after a federal judge ruled the merger could proceed, Becerra said the state wouldn’t appeal the decision following an agreement that included terms to protect low-income subscribers, extend access to underserved communities, protect T-Mobile and Sprint employees, and create jobs in California.
Building High-Speed Network Will Take Six Years: T-Mobile
Bloomberg also reported Tuesday that instead of delivering wireless-connection speeds of 300 megabits per second to 93% of the state in four years, T-Mobile said that the documents should have said six years.
“We appreciate the willingness of the commission’s staff and the commissioners to work with us to resolve our outstanding concerns and clarifications,” T-Mobile said in a statement.
FCC Investigating Last Week’s T-Mobile Outage
Last week, as many as 68 million T-Mobile customers were hit with a daylong service outage, which drew a federal investigation. The company blamed an internet-traffic issue that caused problems with its network for the outage.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission tweeted that the outage was “unacceptable.”
