T-Mobile Wants Out of Mandate to Add 1,000 California Jobs

(Bloomberg) -- Two and a half months into the life of the “new” T-Mobile US Inc., the self-proclaimed maverick mobile-phone carrier is already asking to roll back mandates proposed by California in exchange for approval to buy its smaller rival Sprint Corp.

T-Mobile -- now the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier because of the April 1 merger -- is asking the state’s Public Utilities Commission for a waiver of job-creation goals and network-speed milestones.

Though T-Mobile’s agreement with California included the creation of 1,000 full-time jobs, the company said Tuesday that the state can’t dictate hiring. The Covid-19 crisis “makes the imposition of a mandate to create additional jobs infeasible and unwarranted,” it said in a filing with the commission.

And instead of delivering wireless-connection speeds of 300 megabits per second to 93% of the state in four years, the company said that the documents should have said six years.

“We appreciate the willingness of the commission’s staff and the commissioners to work with us to resolve our outstanding concerns and clarifications,” T-Mobile said in a statement.

The company said it remains committed to maintaining its current number of California jobs over the next three years, and plans to open a customer-service center in the state.

Lone Holdout

As the lone holdout among the states, California had granted conditional approval only in mid-April, two weeks after the merger.

The enlarged T-Mobile is off to a rocky start. Last week, as many as 68 million customers were hit with a daylong service outage, which drew a federal investigation. That same week, it wrote down its T-Mobile TV venture by $218 million.

T-Mobile also recently started shuffling its retail stores. Thousands of Metro and Sprint store employees are being displaced as they face the prospect of searching for different jobs at T-Mobile or leaving the company.

Former Chief Executive Officer John Legere pitched job growth as a key benefit when he announced the merger with Sprint two years ago.

“We will be adding thousands of new jobs early on, and I can easily envision this leading to tens of thousands over time,” he said. Legere left his job in April.

T-Mobile said Tuesday that, overall, it has vowed to add 5,000 new jobs and it’s only in the first year of the merger.

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