John Legere has been the CEO of T-Mobile U.S. since September 2012. T-Mobile is a staunchly anti-union company despite the fact that workers for its parent company, Deutsche Telekom (Germany), are unionized by the German labor union ver.di. T-Mobile is one of only two U.S. companies that the NLRB has consolidated unfair labor practice charges against because of a nationwide systemic pattern of illegal activity; the other is Walmart. John Legere markets himself as a counterculture figure. He has long hair, uses foul language, and dresses like a hipster. He uses Twitt er and social media effectively to market himself as the T-Mobile brand. He and T-Mobile use "uncarrier" as their brand image and market directly to millennials as a radical company that is shaking up the telecom industry. They advertise things like "no more 2 year contracts" and "unlimited data" but consumer advocacy groups have found T-Mobile to be engaged in deceptive advertising practices and have found that the company exploits low income customers with their misleading advertising. John Legere and T-Mobile have also been accused of violating net neutrality by throttling data and allowing some streaming services preferential treatment for creating partnerships with T-Mobile. John Legere and T-Mobile have also tried to market their company as champions of diversity and supporters of the LGBTQ+ community (to their credit, T-Mobile regularly participates in PrideFest). However, the day after the election of Donald Trump, John Legere tweeted congratulations to a President-elect who used hate and divisiveness to get elected (see attached screenshot). In other words, John Legere is your run-of-the-mill cutthroat corporatist CEO. What makes him more nefarious than most, is he is a wolf in hipster clothing, so to speak. He operates without any regard for workers rights, net neutrality, or consumer protection but does so by deceiving millennials into believe he is their champion. It's a brilliant strategy as many of his millennial employees and customers worship him which makes union organizing even more difficult as we are not just needing to overcome company loyalty but hero worship as well. One of our strategies for cutting into this hero worship in CWA's T-Mobile organizing campaign in Colorado has been to create a parody Twitter account that is a fictional pro-union version of John Legere. https://twitter.com/theunionceo
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Nominated by CWA District 7
