A joint council representing 200,000 Teamsters has asked the FCC to allow the proposed Comcast-NBC Universal joint venture to keep on trucking.
In a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and the other commissioners, Joint Council 42, representing members in Southern California, Nevada, Guam, Saipan and Hawaii said the deal was "very much" in their interests. They said Comcast has been a "good faith negotiator," and that they do not think the deal will result in job losses.
Comcast has agreed to honor NBCU's collective bargaining agreements, and Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts said the deal is not about cutting jobs, pointing out that it is a primarily vertical deal. The union letter echoes those points, saying it is not likely to lead to the redundancies that result in job cuts in horizontal mergers.
Not all unions have been as sanguine about the combo. The Communications Workers of America has been critical of the deal, saying it would likely mean "the loss of good jobs, the erosion of employee rights, and [would] undermine living standards in the communications and media industries."
Comments continue to flood the FCC docket, with more than 26,000 filings in the last 30 days, many generated by a
Free Press online form asking that the deal be blocked. But it is hard to tell just how many people that represents since the commission is logging duplicate copies from the same person. For example, a "Terri L. Haney" is credited with four identical comments, all of them from Free Press' online complaint form, while a spot check found examples of duplicate and triplicate comments.
