In a recent filing with the Federal Communications Commission, Sorenson called concerns about turnover among VIs affecting the ability for it to provide good service “baseless.”
The Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which has written extensively about the VRS industry and supported the OPEIU campaign to organize sign language interpreters, filed a comment in November 2024 opposing the FCC’s proposal to grant permanent certification to Sorenson as opposed to the conditional certification that it has been operating under since Ariel acquired it in 2022. In the comment, PESP raised two primary concerns:
1) The enormous debt load that Sorenson has borne since the Ariel acquisition. The FCC and Sorenson owe the public real transparency about how much debt Sorenson currently has, who owns it, and what percentage is owned by The Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm that owns 27 percent of Sorenson.
2) The poor working conditions of VIs, which leads to high turnover.
In response, Sorenson said that “PESP has raised a baseless concern that the tenure of Sorenson’s interpreters puts Sorenson “at risk of failing to meet the Commission’s minimum requirements,” and also added that “Sorenson’s debt structure does not negatively affect Sorenson’s VRS service.”
Through the hundreds of conversations that the ASL Interpreters Union has had with Sorenson interpreters, concerns about turnover and its impacts on service quality have come up in nearly every one. How exactly does Sorenson arrive at the conclusion that the concerns of hundreds of their interpreters are “baseless”?
The ASL Interpreters Union is organizing to win a union at Sorenson and ZP Better Together. For more information, please reach out to [email protected].