AT&T Legacy T Bargaining Report #47

A huge box arrived from Local 6201 in Ft. Worth, Texas with instructions to give it to the Company bargainers.  It was full of branded items that had been distributed to employees – all kinds of AT&T and “Starz” merchandise.  There were T-shirts and pads and ceramic cups and tissue boxes and balls and pens and hundreds of other items.  The Union’s message was clear – we’re not interested in your “trash and trinkets” and your phony contests and fake appreciation.  If AT&T respected its employees, they would use the money they waste on this junk to contribute to a fair contract.  We cannot be bought off that cheaply.  We guess they were not too interested in it either.  Their team left it behind at the end of the session.

At the table, we TAed a few items including a small improvement in Article 43 and Article 45.  AT&T “officially” withdrew their original demand to increase the overtime trigger point when time-and-a-half becomes double time and a proposal to charge a processing fee to members who have their salaries garnished.  But, when it came to the important items, all we got was “We reject…”  They not only rejected our proposal to improve our job security language (the watermark and the limit to involuntary layoffs), but they reintroduced their demand to eliminate the letter completely.  They rejected our Successorship letter.  They rejected counting unpaid Union time for FMLA purposes, which discriminates against our Local reps.  They rejected our demand to improve the Success Sharing Plan.  They rejected all of our proposals to improve lives of workers under “leveraged titles” who are slaves to unreasonable quota policies by the Company.

Your Union bargainers returned right back to the table and resubmitted our key demands and will present more tomorrow.

If you are not doing everything in your offices and Locals to push this company, this situation will not change.  We need every one of you to do something that pushes this company to a different response.  The bargaining team is doing everything it can at the table to push for your interests.  The activity in the field is what is going to make the real difference.