A three-day-strike by as many as 21,000 AT&T employees could leave the company’s retail stores shut this weekend.
Top of the Order:
Picket This: If you are an AT&T customer, you might have woken up Friday and thought to yourself, “Why, this weekend would provide a perfect opportunity for me to finally get down to my corner AT&T store, see about upgrading to a new cellphone and, maybe, look into subscribing to DirecTV!”
But you might want to put those thoughts aside and make other plans.
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Biz Break: Amazon Prime Video looks set to come to Apple TV That’s because as many as 21,000 AT&T wireless, DirecTV and wireline workers walked off the job Friday afternoon to start a three-day strike. The AT&T employees are part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union, and they began the strike after failing to reach a new contract with the nation’s No. 2 wireless carrier.
The strike involves AT&T employees in 36 states and the District of Columbia. Many AT&T employees in California and Nevada also joined the strike, which, because of its reach across AT&T’s businesses, could result in company retail stores being closed through the weekend.
The AT&T employees are striking over some of the usual things that union workers are seeking to retain with their jobs: affordable benefits, fair wages and job security, as well as AT&T continuing to outsource jobs to locations outside of the U. S.
This weekend’s strike follows on the heels of a similar brief walkout by 17,000 AT&T wireline workers in California and Nevada.
So, if you show up at that AT&T store this weekend and find the doors locked, maybe take a look down the block. I’ m sure Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and everyone else will be doing business as usual.
Middle Innings:
Taking Leave: Doesn’ t everyone by now know that almost anything you say online can come back to haunt you? Especially if you say it on a very public forum like Yelp. Apparently, that memo didn’ t reach the office of a professor in the hallowed halls of Ivy League bastion Yale University. Yale placed the dean of its Pierson College on leave after several of her Yelp reviews of local businesses contained some pretty nasty views of the establishments, and her takes on the clientele that might go to those places.
And More from Uber: Did you think a week could go by without some kind of drama coming out of Uber? Well, think again! The ride-sharing giant, which is embroiled in a trade-secrets lawsuit with Google’s Waymo, told Anthony Levandowski to hand over any confidential Waymo files he has, or else he can go pound sand and look for a new job .
Why is Levandowski such a big deal? He’s one of Uber’s top self-driving technology engineers. And he’s also a former Waymo employee. And Waymo contends that before he left the company to found self-driving startup Otto, Levandowski made off with more than 14,000 confidential Waymo files. Uber got involved after it acquired Otto. And a federal judge this week ordered Uber to use its muscle to make Levandowski hand over any files that Waymo seeks in its lawsuit. For his part, Levandowski has filed a motion that asks the court to modify its order.
Bottom of the Lineup:
The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index rose 0.5 percent to end the day at 6,083.70.
The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed by 0.7 percent to 20,804.84.
And the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index also rose 0.7 percent to finish the week at 2,381.73.
Quote of the Day: “We won’ t see double-digit growth in the area again soon, but this could be the start of a more sustainable trend.” — Jay Denton, vice president of analytics for Axiometrics. Denton was speaking about an Axiometrics report that showed rent prices in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco have begun edging back north after months of mild, but noticeable declines.
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