Look, it's not as if we didn't already know Comcast is a ruthless company focused only on profit (while attempting to rebrand its product as Xfinity because the brand is so damned toxic) but it sure would be nice if media types stopped praising the GOP tax scam as good for jobs just because Lyin' Paul Ryan said so:
The firings happened around December 15. On December 20, Comcast announced that, because of the pending tax cut and recent repeal of net neutrality rules, it would give "special bonuses" of $1,000 to more than 100,000 employees and invest more than $50 billion in infrastructure over the next five years.
"With these investments, we expect to add thousands of new direct and indirect jobs," Comcast said at the time.
We examined Comcast's investment claims in an article on December 21. As it turns out, Comcast's annual investments already soared during the two-plus years that net neutrality rules were on the books, and the $50 billion amount could be achieved if those investments simply continued increasing by a modest amount.
Comcast was one of the most active companies lobbying for lower corporate tax rates in 2017, Vox reported shortly before the tax changes passed in December.
The 500 fired employees were "managers, supervisors, and direct sales people in Chicago, Florida, and other parts of Comcast's Central region, mostly in the Midwest and Southeastern United States," the Inquirer reported.
These include many salespeople "who walk neighborhoods and troll apartment complexes to pitch [Comcast's] telecom and TV services." When Comcast announced the firings internally, the employees were told that a new direct sales system requires fewer humans, the fired employee told the Inquirer.
