You EWA workers eating your free buffalo wings in your hotel do not know how the company really manages things let me explain.....
The company used to have people at work "on call" to dispatch out and fix a circuit if needed. If there were no repairs in that area for an hour or 2, which happened a lot especially after hours, the company did not care, because it used to be worth it to them to have someone on call particularly for more high end customers who demand 24 hour dispatch.
The company also had people "on call" in various central office jobs, to assist the field or deal with whatever situation might arise,24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You could compare it to a night security guard or even the fire dept. They might not be working at all times, but they are paid to be there in the event they are needed. It is their job to be there and be available for dispatch.
With the new system coming from VLSS or wherever, that is no longer the case, now it is no longer acceptable that anyone be on call. We do not know how many repairs might be needed at any given time. It could be feast or famine, we do not make widgets on an assembly line, but our productivity is evaluated in this way. The result? If there are not enough repairs the tech has done something wrong. If the tech has done something wrong the manager has done something wrong. So managers scramble to find pointless busywork to CYA.
Techs are evaluated for something called "FDR" or "First Dispatch Resolution". This means that the company would like an install or repair to be permanently resolved on the first dispatch.
A laudable goal, but what if the customer is not home? You can't break into their house and fix the line. You would think the company would not hold it against their technician if the customer is not available to provide access, but they do! Every no access counts against the field technician's numbers for FDR.
Ok but what if there is a problem inside the Central Office? Field techs cannot work in the central office, surely that would not count against their numbers! OH but yes it does! Every time there is a problem in the Central Office, it now counts against the field techs FDR number.
Ok, but what about if the cable itself is defective at the customer's location? The field tech only works with the end-user from the f1, it can't be his fault if there are no acceptable pairs at the feeder! That is cable maintenance's job right? Wrong again! Every job that is returned to cable maintenance goes against the technicians FDR numbers!
Ok so why does it matter what FDR numbers a tech has? Obviously the system is totally unreasonable, no one can think this is a fair way to evaluate performance so it should not affect the techs job right?
Wrong again! The bottom 6 technicians with lowest FDR numbers are brought in by management for a QAR (I believe it stand for Quality Assurance Review) during the QAR, the technician is interrogated for hours over exactly what he did on some random day. If he cannot explain everything, if he went to the bathroom without asking for permission and forgot about it days later, he will be Suspended without pay for 30 days. That is 30 business days, so six weeks without pay. The tech is also placed on a 2 year final warning, so that if they ever catch him for any infraction no matter how trivial (or even made up) he will lose his job, and the pension he has worked for for 20 or 30 years.
And this is currently the case no matter how good the numbers in a shop are! No matter how high they get that number there will always be 6 people on the bottom, and those people will be harassed and possibly suspended.
The company claims they do this to improve customer service. If they are concerned with customer service, they could do a lot more by repairing some of the cable that is still in use. They are not too interested in that for some reason.
Personally, I believe the whole system was designed to harass Union techs, make them retire, make them quit or fire them.
Where I worked in the months prior to the strike everyone was completely miserable.