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At Sprint, Retirement Means Going Back to Work Full-Time
The story of Bettina Latham permeates a bargaining table in Wilmington, N.C., where CWA leaders are trying to negotiate a first contract with Sprint on behalf of 300 service representatives organized last year.
Bettina Latham’s story is a tragic commentary on how Sprint — legally — planned to take her modest pension from her and her struggle to fight back and hold on. She “retired” last Dec. 31 after 30 years with the company but has now been forced to go back to work on a full-time basis to make ends meet.
Under the company scenario, by the time Latham paid Sprint’s deductions of more than $450 a month for health care coverage and paid taxes on the $765.19 monthly pension, she would have been left with about $30 — a dollar a month for each year she had worked for the company.
“Basically, they stole her pension from her by converting it to pay for health care,” CWA Representative Jimmy Gurganus says, sadly.
He contrasts Latham’s fate with Sprint CEO William Esrey, who recently was awarded stock options valued at $188 million as part of his 1997 compensation package. “No justice,” Gurganus says.
What management did to Latham, of New Bern, N.C., may have been legally correct but morally wrong, adds Gurganus, who is chairing the bargaining efforts.
Latham told the CWA News that she started trying to get information from Sprint’s human resources division last August but that they kept giving her soft answers to hard questions.
Finally, she was told, her pension would amount to $765.19, and she and her husband thought that they could make it on that, provided she perform some part-time work at the nearby community college in Jacksonville, N.C. She had already taken some courses in preparation, and in fact was teaching several computer courses, including her favorite — “Computers for Fraidy Cats.”
“I thought that would be great, to be able to do something I really enjoyed, rather than something that had become drudgery,” Latham says. For 28 of those years at Sprint, the mother of two grown children and grandmother of four had taken work home from the office. She started her career with Carolina Telephone in 1966. Later, Carolina Tel merged with Sprint. Over the years, she served the company as an operator, a service assistant and, finally, a sales representative in the business office.
She and Sprint service representatives in three areas of North Carolina — New Bern, Clinton and Fayetteville — voted for CWA representation in a hard-fought campaign late last May. They chose union representation despite an ugly anti-union campaign by Sprint, typical of the company’s efforts to avoid unions. Sprint is the same company that fired 177 telemarketers in San Francisco a week before a CWA representation vote in 1994.
Bessie Sterling, editor of the local publication for Local 3603, Charlotte, N.C., remembers when she talked to Latham earlier this year “she was devastated.”
Her period of devastation started two weeks into the new year, when the company finally gave her the final figures on her pension and her health benefits. That was when she and her husband calculated the result and found she would be left with $30 a month.
What the company did to Latham, according to Gurganus, was legal, because she had taken an early retirement. The way the plan is currently written, Gurganus says, any employee born after 1946 is heavily penalized for each year they retire before age 65.
Basically, management’s contribution toward health care for an active employee is $4,154 on a $4,711 premium. For Latham, however, the company’s contribution dropped to $1,027 and the premium rose to $6,486, leaving her to pick up the $5,459 difference.
Under ERISA (the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act), employers cannot reduce pensions but the law is silent on how much a company can take from a retiree for benefits such as health care, experts say.
“I lost 14 pounds and started worrying myself to death over it when human resources told me the bad news,” Latham recalls. That was in mid-January, two weeks after her last day at work although she was still collecting earned vacation payments.
That sent her into a feverish job search, which ended successfully in mid-March when she accepted a full-time job with full benefits at Bailey’s Insurance Co. in Jacksonville. With health insurance paid by Bailey’s, Latham was able to tell Sprint to cancel her health benefits and to give her her pension.
Now, she says, she is looking forward to May 12, when she goes back to school to take courses that she hopes will lead to a license to sell insurance.
Meanwhile, at the bargaining table, Gurganus says Bettina Latham’s story lays heavily on his mind.
Recalling the organizing campaign that it took to win union representation for the service reps in the first place, CWA President Morton Bahr said, “Sprint management, as usual, played hardball all the way.”
The hardball tactics have definitely continued into the bargaining arena, Gurganus says.
Although bargaining started last August, the parties are only now beginning to deal with such economic issues as medical care, pensions and wages, he says. Along the way, Gurganus reports, management fought especially hard over provisions dealing with seniority, layoffs and recalls. “At one point, management wanted to offer layoff protections to only a quarter of the bargaining unit, leaving the other 75 percent of the workers at risk,” Gurganus says.
Bettina Latham’s story is a tragic commentary on how Sprint — legally — planned to take her modest pension from her and her struggle to fight back and hold on. She “retired” last Dec. 31 after 30 years with the company but has now been forced to go back to work on a full-time basis to make ends meet.
Under the company scenario, by the time Latham paid Sprint’s deductions of more than $450 a month for health care coverage and paid taxes on the $765.19 monthly pension, she would have been left with about $30 — a dollar a month for each year she had worked for the company.
“Basically, they stole her pension from her by converting it to pay for health care,” CWA Representative Jimmy Gurganus says, sadly.
He contrasts Latham’s fate with Sprint CEO William Esrey, who recently was awarded stock options valued at $188 million as part of his 1997 compensation package. “No justice,” Gurganus says.
What management did to Latham, of New Bern, N.C., may have been legally correct but morally wrong, adds Gurganus, who is chairing the bargaining efforts.
Latham told the CWA News that she started trying to get information from Sprint’s human resources division last August but that they kept giving her soft answers to hard questions.
Finally, she was told, her pension would amount to $765.19, and she and her husband thought that they could make it on that, provided she perform some part-time work at the nearby community college in Jacksonville, N.C. She had already taken some courses in preparation, and in fact was teaching several computer courses, including her favorite — “Computers for Fraidy Cats.”
“I thought that would be great, to be able to do something I really enjoyed, rather than something that had become drudgery,” Latham says. For 28 of those years at Sprint, the mother of two grown children and grandmother of four had taken work home from the office. She started her career with Carolina Telephone in 1966. Later, Carolina Tel merged with Sprint. Over the years, she served the company as an operator, a service assistant and, finally, a sales representative in the business office.
She and Sprint service representatives in three areas of North Carolina — New Bern, Clinton and Fayetteville — voted for CWA representation in a hard-fought campaign late last May. They chose union representation despite an ugly anti-union campaign by Sprint, typical of the company’s efforts to avoid unions. Sprint is the same company that fired 177 telemarketers in San Francisco a week before a CWA representation vote in 1994.
Bessie Sterling, editor of the local publication for Local 3603, Charlotte, N.C., remembers when she talked to Latham earlier this year “she was devastated.”
Her period of devastation started two weeks into the new year, when the company finally gave her the final figures on her pension and her health benefits. That was when she and her husband calculated the result and found she would be left with $30 a month.
What the company did to Latham, according to Gurganus, was legal, because she had taken an early retirement. The way the plan is currently written, Gurganus says, any employee born after 1946 is heavily penalized for each year they retire before age 65.
Basically, management’s contribution toward health care for an active employee is $4,154 on a $4,711 premium. For Latham, however, the company’s contribution dropped to $1,027 and the premium rose to $6,486, leaving her to pick up the $5,459 difference.
Under ERISA (the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act), employers cannot reduce pensions but the law is silent on how much a company can take from a retiree for benefits such as health care, experts say.
“I lost 14 pounds and started worrying myself to death over it when human resources told me the bad news,” Latham recalls. That was in mid-January, two weeks after her last day at work although she was still collecting earned vacation payments.
That sent her into a feverish job search, which ended successfully in mid-March when she accepted a full-time job with full benefits at Bailey’s Insurance Co. in Jacksonville. With health insurance paid by Bailey’s, Latham was able to tell Sprint to cancel her health benefits and to give her her pension.
Now, she says, she is looking forward to May 12, when she goes back to school to take courses that she hopes will lead to a license to sell insurance.
Meanwhile, at the bargaining table, Gurganus says Bettina Latham’s story lays heavily on his mind.
Recalling the organizing campaign that it took to win union representation for the service reps in the first place, CWA President Morton Bahr said, “Sprint management, as usual, played hardball all the way.”
The hardball tactics have definitely continued into the bargaining arena, Gurganus says.
Although bargaining started last August, the parties are only now beginning to deal with such economic issues as medical care, pensions and wages, he says. Along the way, Gurganus reports, management fought especially hard over provisions dealing with seniority, layoffs and recalls. “At one point, management wanted to offer layoff protections to only a quarter of the bargaining unit, leaving the other 75 percent of the workers at risk,” Gurganus says.