News

Even while AT&T prepares to wrestle with regulators and some investors over the company's late June decision to acquire Tele-Communications Inc. in a $48 billion stock deal, TCI workers are looking forward to a fairer playing field when it comes to winning union representation.

Several years back, management at a number of the regional Bell companies made a huge mistake and drastically cut the jobs of service representatives, technicians and other telecom workers, mostly in an attempt to please Wall Street.

Disconnected: How Six People from AT&T Discovered the New Meaning of Work in a Downsized Corporate America
by Barbara Rudolph
Free Press, 1998 (224 pages, $25)
Cloth, ISBN 0-684-84266-1

A strike by 6,400 Puerto Rican telephone workers, which mushroomed into a general labor strike that virtually stopped all commerce on the island July 7 and 8, was settled as the CWA News went to press.

Virgil D. Parks, who was an administrative assistant to the vice president of District 9 in CWA’s Burlingame, Calif., office, retired March 1. Parks, 61, went to work for Pacific Telesis in June 1956, in Redding, Calif., and soon became active in CWA Local 9419.