CWA: Broadband workers' safety and wages have gone down

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 said. Internet service providers also often subcontract work to companies that didn’t receive public broadband funding, hindering the accountability of work conditions. 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.