AT&T "Legacy T" Bargaining Report #34

The Bargaining Team spent Friday, Saturday and Monday in Subcommittee Meetings with the Company on Health Care, Employment Security, Articles 35 and 36 (including monitoring), and Articles 45 and 46.  Subcommittees are generally useful since they are more informal and issues can be more openly discussed; but in this case, little progress was made.  The Company continues to hold all of OUR key issues in ransom for THEIR health care cost shifting plan.  Since we are still very far apart on health care, it has been close to impossible to get them to seriously address our key concerns.

There is no formal bargaining today as the bargaining committee reviews our demands.

We have received a lot of questions about AT&T's Health Care proposal because of the Company's misleading statements.  Below is a reprint of parts of an earlier bargaining report just to remind you how bad their proposal is and why you need to mobilize so strongly against it.  Their Health Care proposal has not changed since this March 27th report:

Their newest set of proposals on Health Care, pensions and other parts of the Contract, create "two tiers" - one set for CURRENT employees and another set for "NEW HIRES."  Their definition of new hires includes not just brand new workers (which is bad enough), but anyone who was laid off and came back through any other method except recall.  For example, a 20-year employee who is off roll for a few months and gets a job through ARS in the same title, in a neighboring GCA, gets treated like a NEW HIRE for all benefits… 

Their Health Care Benefit Proposal: All the regressive things they put out last time are now for New Hires.  The plan for current employees is better but not by much.  They want current employees to pay monthly premiums for 2010 of $0 for individuals, $60 for the employee plus 1 dependent and $120 for a family.  These amounts could vary year-to-year based on Company assessments of its costs.  However, even with these premiums, there are still deductibles of 1% of annual pay for individuals, 2% for individuals plus 1, and 3% for families.  There's a maximum, but the family of an employee who makes $50,000 a year will need to pay out $1500 before they get a penny of benefits (with some exceptions like preventative care).  In addition, there is a "co-insurance" (what we call a co-pay) when you actually go to the doctor, emergency room, or hospital.  For "in-network" it is 10% of the cost of the doctor's visit, lab tests, etc.  There are maximums, but for a family it is 8% of annual pay with a maximum of $5300!  There is more but you get the point.  It stinks, and this is just for CURRENT employees (using the definition we talked about above).