John Legere was adamant, bordering on indignant.
“This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter,” wrote T-Mobile’s then-CEO in an April 2019 post responding to critics of the merger. “That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact.”
He chided critics of the company’s $26.5 billion Sprint merger — expressing disappointment that they would “mislead and scare people into thinking that their made-up ‘numbers’ about jobs at the New T-Mobile are accurate.”
Legere was more specific when testifying under oath at a March 2019 U.S. House Judiciary Committee antitrust subcommittee hearing, in between playing along with legislators’ jokes about his magenta sneakers, and putting up with questions about his stays at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
“We’ll have 3,600 more employees in the first year than the two separate companies combined, and 11,000 by 2024,” Legere promised, adding later: “Jobs will go up every single day of this new company.”
The message was even more strong on allfor5g.com, a site published by T-Mobile in 2018 to describe the benefits of the Sprint merger: “This is a JOB CREATING transaction. We get it, that’s not the industry standard, but we DON’T DO STANDARD! We expect that the New T-Mobile will always have more U.S. employees on payroll than the prior standalone companies do now.”
Four years later, and three years after T-Mobile and Sprint completed their combination, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert, Legere’s successor, marked the anniversary with a celebratory post on Monday.
The merger, he wrote, has succeeded in “breaking down the wireless industry’s decades-old forced choice between the best value and the best network” and “created titanic shifts in wireless and broadband” to benefit businesses and consumers.
The company’s financial results tell the story. Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile ended 2022 with 113.5 million customers (up from 86 million at the end of 2019), $79.5 billion in revenues (up from $45 billion in revenues in 2019), and $6.5 billion in operating profits (up from $5.7 billion in operating profits in 2019).
It’s hard to dispute that the combination with Sprint has given the “New T-Mobile” a stronger competitive position against rivals Verizon and AT&T, which was a primary goal of the merger.
But what about jobs?
T-Mobile’s latest annual regulatory filing shows that the company employed 71,000 people as of the end of 2022. That’s about 9,000 fewer than the approximately 80,000 people the two companies employed when they merged in early 2020. Even factoring in the roughly 2,000 open positions currently listed by T-Mobile, that’s about 7,000 fewer jobs.
With various reports of T-Mobile layoffs in recent years, this isn’t a huge surprise.
And while it’s nowhere near the job growth that Legere promised, it is fewer than the 20,000 job losses predicted by the Communications Workers of America as a result of the Sprint and T-Mobile combination.
In addition, a lot has happened in the broader world since the merger, including a global pandemic and unprecedented economic turmoil. Things change, industries retrench, projections are just projections. It would seem only natural for T-Mobile to readily acknowledge that it fell short of its pledge in the face of a long list of challenges.
Instead, this was the full statement provided by a T-Mobile spokesperson when I asked this week.
“We’ve upheld our jobs commitment. Before we merged with Sprint we said we’d have more employees as a combined company than the two standalone companies would have had on their own without the merger — and we have done just that. The merger has also allowed us to do many things we otherwise would have been unable to do like deliver choice and connectivity for underserved and small markets and rural areas, in addition to creating new businesses and growing our consumer and enterprise businesses — all of which have created thousands of jobs for T-Mobile, as well as our vendors and partners.”
This was a surprise.
Just to be sure, I double-checked to make sure I understood this correctly: The promise in 2019 to “employ more people than Sprint and T-Mobile do separately” was not a promise to employ more people than their combined total employment at the time? It was a promise to employ more people than the combined total of their separate workforces in a future scenario in which they didn’t merge?
Yes, that’s correct, the spokesperson confirmed.
OK. Giving it one last try, I asked via email, “Do you think legislators and the public understood this to mean what you’re saying now, that these specific pledges for net job growth would be benchmarked not against the combined employment of Sprint and T-Mobile when they merged, but rather against a hypothetical, undisclosed projection from an alternative scenario in which the companies didn’t merge?”
I also asked the company to point me to anywhere that T-Mobile or Sprint explained things back then in the way the company is explaining them now.
The spokesperson said T-Mobile didn’t have more to add on the matter, beyond its latest statement and the numerous public comments, posts, and interviews by Sievert and Legere on the matter.
I’ve been as factual and complete as possible in presenting things here, so at this point I’ll leave it to readers to decide for themselves if the company’s pledge back then matches its explanation of those words now.
In the end, this experience has been a good lesson for me. As a reporter and editor at various stages of this story, I took the company’s pledge on jobs at face value. I wish I had pressed for more details back then, if for nothing more than to be able to say definitively now that the company is engaging in revisionist history.
Others have been just as literal in their interpretation of the company’s pre-merger jobs promise, including the Wall Street Journal in this May 2021 story reporting that the company was “off to a slow start” in trying to meet its pledge.
If I could be so bold, it seems there’s also a lesson for our elected representatives here. Thinking back to that March 2019 House antitrust hearing, the public would have been better served by fewer questions about hotels, shoes, and such, and more questions about the real meaning of the company’s pledge to create jobs.
Update: CWA spokesperson Beth Allen provided this statement in response to my inquiry:
“The facts – and the company’s quarterly report – speak for themselves. The company boasts about its record growth and $6.0 billion in merger-related “synergies,” which includes $1.3 billion it has saved by using Sprint’s network instead of building out its own. T-Mobile has about 10,000 fewer employees today than the combined companies had prior to the merger. As we predicted, T-Mobile’s pre-merger promises were empty rhetoric. The merger has allowed the company’s executives to cut jobs, minimize investments in job-creating infrastructure, and use the savings to buyback their own stock.”
I also contacted Legere this morning, and I’ll update this post if he responds.
