NY Audit Says Charter Wasn't Ready for 2017 Strike
Charter failed to adequately prepare for a 2017 workers’ strike in New York, said a state audit released Thursday. The New York Public Service Commission adopted as part of its unanimous consent agenda an order to release the Jan. 12,…
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2020, redacted audit report and require Charter to file a plan to implement recommendations within 30 days. “It is not unreasonable to conclude a work stoppage was foreseeable, definable, measurable and, with sufficient preparation, manageable,” it said. Charter knew about an existing labor agreement when it proposed buying Time Warner Cable in 2015, which got New York PSC OK in 2016, the report said. “Charter can realize improvement in both its specific response to any future work stoppage as well as its response to any number of material threats it may encounter in the future as a consequence of technological obsolescence, geopolitical events and malicious behavior. However, to do so may require organizational and operational changes by Charter to ensure an ever-growing number of ‘enterprise-level’ threats can be efficiently and effectively addressed.” The 2017 labor dispute’s “relevance to Charter’s current emergency preparedness has decreased with the passage of time, as the Company has experienced and learned from numerous intervening events since" then, Charter said in a Dec. 22 response also released Thursday. Vandalism caused many of the company’s 2017 outages, and in following years, "there have been very few wide-scale service disruptions for Charter’s customers,” it said. “Since 2016, including throughout the labor dispute, Charter has taken steps to harden its network and establish outage protocols to improve communication and coordination during major events, such as extreme weather, to restore service as quickly as possible.” The company already implemented “numerous steps recommended by the Final Report,” it said. Charter urged the PSC not to accept everything in the report. “In many places, the Final Report not only lacks support for its claims, it reflects little more than the auditor’s subjective opinions about best practices based on its limited experience with highly regulated [ILECs] without reference to any legal authority or industry standards, and misapprehends important evidence, including discussions with knowledgeable Charter personnel, that did not match the auditor’s preconceived expectations or conclusions.” The company didn’t comment Thursday.