“Regulatory Revival” and Employment in Telecommunications

Empirical research demonstrates that the Obama Administration’s aggressive regulatory agenda at the Federal Communications Commission reduced investment in the telecommunications sector between $20 and $40 billion annually, robbing the nation of a boom in network expansion the public wants and Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act mandates.

As there is a direct relationship between network investment and jobs, the next logical question to ask is how this reduced network investment affected employment in the telecommunications sector. Using standard economic techniques and publicly-available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ford finds that over the period 2010-2016, the telecommunications sector lost approximately 100,000 jobs per year—many of them high-paying union jobs. This loss is the pay-equivalent of about 130,000 “average” US jobs.