AT&T "Legacy T" Bargaining Report #31

The Bargaining Team spent yesterday reviewing health care proposals and preparing demands for today's session.

The Bargaining Team had a meeting this morning with CWA President Larry Cohen and EVP Annie Hill to discuss the structure of bargaining and our particular problems at the Legacy T table.  We shared our concerns and President Cohen explained how he saw the issues and what he was doing to try to resolve them.  It is clear that this is very different from any bargaining this unit has been involved with in the past, and we need to increase pressure and find more ways to push the Company to be more responsive at the bargaining table.

When we met with the Company, we responded to many of parts of the Company's "final" proposal.  We reintroduced our demands on job security, JOG, training, military leave, force adjustment, and others that we still believe are important to our members.  We rejected AT&T management's retrogressive demands on overtime and on-call in many of the Articles and demanded the Company restore the original language.  We rejected their attempt to eliminate electronic monitoring language that we fought for over many, many years.  We rejected their elimination of many letters that are important to us.  The Company responded, as usual, "We understand your proposal", and as usual, no progress was made.  There was one bit of movement, however.  They withdrew their proposal to eliminate carry-over vacations.