VOICES FOR A STABLE FUTURE

Before divestiture, Bell System “stakeholders” were subscribers, shareowners and operating company employees whose need for industry-specific legal, technical or regulatory information was minimal. The 1984 Consent Decree, the Modified Final Judgment and the Telecom Act changed all that.

There is now a wide range of stakeholders, including technology suppliers, contractors, consultants, labor unions and an ever-growing body of Bell retirees. The latter are, with good reason, worried about pension stability and other promised benefits, now threatened by government-imposed regulatory dictates that affect the ability of former employers to pay.

Awareness by retirees of the political and regulatory threats to their fiscal well-being has elicited two kinds of organized responses. One is an interaction with ILEC human resources policymakers about the continued honoring of their retirement promises. The other is intercession with government authorities. The point of the latter is to ensure a level regulatory playing field--to allow ILECs to compete fairly and thus earn adequately to sustain pension funds and meet health-care costs.

In California, a grassroots stakeholder association called CARE, for Citizens Against Regulatory Excesses, has emerged. CARE seeks to force the California Public Utilities Commission to recognize that its dilatory actions have resulted in thousands of lost ILEC jobs. Further, the state has incurred huge tax losses resulting from CPUC policies. The result is a skyrocketing increase in retirees’ share of health-care costs.

CARE leaders believe there is a need in the ILEC community for a formal information flow among all those with a stake in its viability. CARE’s experience to date has been to bring its members’ know-how of the industry, plus the political force of its thousands of retiree voters, to add perspective to regulatory decision-making. It recently has provided expert testimony regarding regulators’ flawed unbundled network element policies. These efforts contrast significantly with what regulators normally get from consumer groups and hired guns of the faux-competitors that prefer a free ride on stakeholder assets rather than a capital risk to construct and operate their own facilities.

The hope is that the full ILEC stakeholder community will recognize the need to bring all of its partners into an information exchange loop. If the knowledge and perspective of this largely untapped group of informed stakeholders had been channeled earlier, perhaps more rational outcomes would have been realized on such matters as the destructive impact of network unbundling.