This is a false equivalence. A union might be out of touch with the needs and desires of the membership, but all but the smallest companies do not care about the needs or desires of the employees.

I think they are referring to the snow person as the 'resident'.

Not saying that Spectrum is looking customer by customer, but they definitely have that ability. Every device on a cable companies network is registered and managed by them whether they own it or you own it. They have the ability to get signal levels from individual modems and STBs, and track how many devices are up/down. There are always going to be devices on/off, but if you have a segment that has ~90% of the registered devices normally online, and then it plummets to near zero, they know about that outage about as quickly as you do to be able to tell the techs.

I worked for a small cable company on the backbone side, but in a small outage, like one tree on the wires or car into the pole, the NOC could look at the devices offline and account addresses and tell the techs the break was mostly like between house 10 and 12 if they were both subscribers. Bigger events we would lose backhaul fiber, so lots of nodes would be down, and you would troubleshoot that node by node at first before moving down to street by street mop up.