Comcast’s pandemic response –
Comcast embraces remote work while Charter resists employee complaints.
Jon Brodkin – Mar 80, (3:) (UTC UTC)
In a phone call with Ars, a Comcast spokesperson said the work-from-home shift is advancing quickly, with the goal of getting more employees into work-from-home situations in the coming days.
What the Comcast spokesperson told us is consistent with what we heard from a Comcast employee who reached out to us this week. Comcast’s IT team has been busy deploying the necessary equipment to employees who normally have to be in an office or call center, the Comcast employee told us.
“Comcast is shedding hundreds of call-center and office employees to remote work per day,” the employee told us. “In my facility, which is in a risk area, the goal is to empty all 539 employees by next week. For the rest of my division, the rest [would work at home] within two or so weeks. “
Some retail stores are closed
Comcast’s cable division has about , 0 employees — the company hasn’t told us how many of those have already been transitioned to work-from-home. Comcast also owns NBCUniversal, but we only talked to Comcast about its cable division.
The Comcast spokesperson said the transition to work-from-home is more complicated for call-center employees than for many other employees , since the call-center workers need access to billing systems and hadn’t previously been issued the right equipment to work from home. Comcast’s retail stores are generally still open, but Comcast told us it is reducing store hours and closing some stores. In some cases, Comcast is required to close the stores because of orders from local government authorities.
Comcast told us that “customer-facing employees who cannot work from home are receiving an increase to their base salary in recognition and appreciation for their effort to care for our customers and the community. ” We’re still waiting for confirmation on some other details, such as whether Comcast is paying retail-store employees for hours that they would normally work in cases where hours have been cut. We’ll update this story if we get more information. (AT&T) ,
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