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Fight on to Protect Jobs in Troubled Telecom Industry
CWA is fighting a multi-front battle to protect and create jobs in today’s troubled telecommunications industry.
In the case of the Bell regionals, union efforts often combine cooperation and confrontation at the same time — working to help these companies throw off unfair and ruinous regulatory restraints while also challenging job cutbacks that are contemptuous of both workers and customers.
The regulatory problems stem from the requirement that the Bells open their networks to competitors by selling lines to resellers at wholesale prices. The trouble is, state public utility commissions have set these wholesale rates at below cost. A competitor of SBC in Michigan, for instance, buys lines at $15 each that cost SBC $26. The competitor, who invests nothing in infrastructure, sells phone service for a nice profit while SBC loses $11 per line.
CWA is working with regulators and rallying political support to ease the burden of UNE (unbundled network element) pricing on the Bells — an issue that may be settled soon when the FCC completes its review of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
However, despite these regulatory handicaps and the economic downturn, job cuts by the Bells simply aren’t justified given continued comfortable profits and huge executive pay packages, CWA is proclaiming loudly. (For more on executive greed and insensitivity, see President Bahr’s column.)
And cutbacks are seriously eroding telecom service everywhere, CWA is pointing out to regulators and the general public.
CWA launched an advertising campaign in New York in mid-November to highlight mounting Verizon service problems and fight the company’s latest round of job cuts. At the same time, CWA is engaged in arbitration and court actions to enforce contract language that prohibits layoffs, reports District 1 Vice President Larry Mancino. Verizon has tried to crawl through an “external events” loophole as a pretext to justify a surplus, but the union maintains an economic slump does not apply.
Moreover, a surplus condition doesn’t exist because Verizon can’t keep up with service demands already, and further cuts will make things worse, CWA charged in calling on the New York public service commission to investigate. The union cited an internal company document which admits that further job cuts will hurt customers.
CWA is also conducting tours throughout the state to show community leaders and the media examples of band-aid repairs and deteriorating plant facilities.
In Pennsylvania, CWA is taking on Verizon’s cutbacks in the state legislature, which is now reviewing whether to renew the 10-year-old telecom deregulation law that sunsets in December. The union has been joined by the Citizens for Consumer Justice in pointing to declining service standards and mounting customer complaints, according to District 13 Vice President Vince Maisano.
In seeking to trim 900 jobs in the state, “Verizon hasn’t been able to give us any data on occupations and locations to be affected, which shows there really isn’t any true surplus condition,” Maisano said. “They simply want to cut the budget and they pulled a number out of the air.”
CWA so far has forestalled involuntary layoffs in the core Verizon units. In District 2, CWA has been able to reclaim some jobs previously done by subcontractors, and an enhanced retirement offering has helped protect jobs too, reports Vice President Pete Catucci.
At BellSouth, CWA has been working to limit the impact of an announced surplus of 1,400 through an agreement to offer supplemental income protection payments across the board, giving additional money to workers who voluntarily leave the payroll. The company “agreed not to limit the numbers in any particular location which has allowed more backfilling,” said Noah Savant, assistant to District 3 Vice President Jimmy Smith.
CWA has also been encouraging members who can afford to do so to accept BellSouth’s plea to take up to a week without pay, a strictly voluntary plan to help protect jobs.
Consolidation of BellSouth call centers also has cost jobs and created hardships. CWA negotiated an enhanced termination package for workers who can’t relocate and is fighting the shutdown of some centers in state legislatures.
At SBC, efforts to protect jobs and protest the magnitude of announced cutbacks — 11,000 jobs –— spans 13 states and four CWA districts.
In the Southwestern Bell region, District 6 is planning a massive rally November 18 in San Antonio, the company’s headquarters, which will spotlight the fact that SBC is still engaging in heavy subcontracting while attempting to trim core jobs. Vice President Andy Milburn reported that CWA has a list of 17,000 company contract employees, 5,000 of them in his district.
At SBC-Ameritech, CWA has reclaimed some of those subcontracted jobs, reported District 4 Vice President Jeff Rechenbach. The union is working with the company to “whittle down the numbers” — the announced surplus there is 1,400 — and to find ways to make sure that members don’t face involuntary layoff, he said.
Similarly in District 9, Vice President Tony Bixler has been meeting with top company officials of SBC-Pacific Bell to find creative ways to protect jobs while helping the company make it through hard times. Meanwhile, California regulators have been investigating the impact of threatened cutbacks on customer service.
And at SBC’s Southern New England Telephone in Connecticut, CWA’s warnings about threatened service problems have prompted the state attorney general to call for an investigation of the impact of a 300-job cutback. Local 1298 has mounted a public letter campaign to Congress and regulators questioning SBC’s investment in sports stadiums and tournament sponsorships while slashing jobs.
Some major telecom employers have unique problems stemming from mismanagement or even fraudulent practices.
Qwest, for instance, is struggling under new management to survive the mismanagement by its former CEO and ongoing investigations of bookkeeping fraud. CWA is working with political and regulatory bodies to keep workers, shareholders and customers from paying the price for the misdeeds of the former Qwest leadership.
To ease pressures on union jobs, CWA negotiated with Qwest to move up by one year the large pension increase scheduled for July of 2003. This prompted many retirement-eligible members to opt for pensions and open up jobs for others, reported District 7 Vice President John Thompson.
Members at Frontier Communications in Rochester, N.Y. and the Midwest were victimized by the Global Crossing scandal. CWA has joined new owner, Citizens Communications, in bankruptcy proceedings to transfer their pension plan from Global Crossing, and the union has filed a class action suit over the handling of workers’ 401(k) accounts.
AT&T members suffered from years of bungled management under CEO Michael Armstrong, who abandoned his bundled services strategy and eventually sold or spun off the valuable wireless and cable properties for which he had grossly overpaid.
CWA’s job battle at AT&T focuses on trying to reclaim jobs that have been misclassified as management and others lost by the thousands to subcontractors. Right now it is unclear whether a new leadership team coming on the scene will opt for a cooperative or a warlike relationship with the union, according to Vice President Ralph Maly.
Meanwhile, Maly’s office has its hands full trying to cope with the meltdown of Lucent where thousands of jobs have been lost through a combination of factors — poor management and bookkeeping irregularities under the previous leadership team, and now the devastating impact of the high tech-telecommunications recession. Analysts talk of the real possibility of bankruptcy.
CWA has been in negotiations with Lucent to find ways to help the company survive while protecting both current jobs and the retirement benefits of 85,000 retirees. At CWA News press time, prospects for a possible early contract settlement appeared bleak, but exploratory talks were still underway.
At Avaya, Maly reported that layoffs have been avoided among the technical workforce because of the negotiated variable workforce agreement, which lays out terms for employment of retired employees on a part-time basis.
Looking over the telecom landscape, President Morton Bahr recently noted: “In my 41 years of negotiating contracts in this industry, I’ve never seen the marketplace turmoil that exists today. Nor have I seen more urgent job security issues that challenge our creativity and resolve.”
In response to this crisis, “We have to fight on all fronts, working with the companies where we can help make them more successful, but also fighting our employers when they try to force unfair sacrifices on our members as an easy solution, while they shelter themselves from the pain,” he said.
In the case of the Bell regionals, union efforts often combine cooperation and confrontation at the same time — working to help these companies throw off unfair and ruinous regulatory restraints while also challenging job cutbacks that are contemptuous of both workers and customers.
The regulatory problems stem from the requirement that the Bells open their networks to competitors by selling lines to resellers at wholesale prices. The trouble is, state public utility commissions have set these wholesale rates at below cost. A competitor of SBC in Michigan, for instance, buys lines at $15 each that cost SBC $26. The competitor, who invests nothing in infrastructure, sells phone service for a nice profit while SBC loses $11 per line.
CWA is working with regulators and rallying political support to ease the burden of UNE (unbundled network element) pricing on the Bells — an issue that may be settled soon when the FCC completes its review of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
However, despite these regulatory handicaps and the economic downturn, job cuts by the Bells simply aren’t justified given continued comfortable profits and huge executive pay packages, CWA is proclaiming loudly. (For more on executive greed and insensitivity, see President Bahr’s column.)
And cutbacks are seriously eroding telecom service everywhere, CWA is pointing out to regulators and the general public.
CWA launched an advertising campaign in New York in mid-November to highlight mounting Verizon service problems and fight the company’s latest round of job cuts. At the same time, CWA is engaged in arbitration and court actions to enforce contract language that prohibits layoffs, reports District 1 Vice President Larry Mancino. Verizon has tried to crawl through an “external events” loophole as a pretext to justify a surplus, but the union maintains an economic slump does not apply.
Moreover, a surplus condition doesn’t exist because Verizon can’t keep up with service demands already, and further cuts will make things worse, CWA charged in calling on the New York public service commission to investigate. The union cited an internal company document which admits that further job cuts will hurt customers.
CWA is also conducting tours throughout the state to show community leaders and the media examples of band-aid repairs and deteriorating plant facilities.
In Pennsylvania, CWA is taking on Verizon’s cutbacks in the state legislature, which is now reviewing whether to renew the 10-year-old telecom deregulation law that sunsets in December. The union has been joined by the Citizens for Consumer Justice in pointing to declining service standards and mounting customer complaints, according to District 13 Vice President Vince Maisano.
In seeking to trim 900 jobs in the state, “Verizon hasn’t been able to give us any data on occupations and locations to be affected, which shows there really isn’t any true surplus condition,” Maisano said. “They simply want to cut the budget and they pulled a number out of the air.”
CWA so far has forestalled involuntary layoffs in the core Verizon units. In District 2, CWA has been able to reclaim some jobs previously done by subcontractors, and an enhanced retirement offering has helped protect jobs too, reports Vice President Pete Catucci.
At BellSouth, CWA has been working to limit the impact of an announced surplus of 1,400 through an agreement to offer supplemental income protection payments across the board, giving additional money to workers who voluntarily leave the payroll. The company “agreed not to limit the numbers in any particular location which has allowed more backfilling,” said Noah Savant, assistant to District 3 Vice President Jimmy Smith.
CWA has also been encouraging members who can afford to do so to accept BellSouth’s plea to take up to a week without pay, a strictly voluntary plan to help protect jobs.
Consolidation of BellSouth call centers also has cost jobs and created hardships. CWA negotiated an enhanced termination package for workers who can’t relocate and is fighting the shutdown of some centers in state legislatures.
At SBC, efforts to protect jobs and protest the magnitude of announced cutbacks — 11,000 jobs –— spans 13 states and four CWA districts.
In the Southwestern Bell region, District 6 is planning a massive rally November 18 in San Antonio, the company’s headquarters, which will spotlight the fact that SBC is still engaging in heavy subcontracting while attempting to trim core jobs. Vice President Andy Milburn reported that CWA has a list of 17,000 company contract employees, 5,000 of them in his district.
At SBC-Ameritech, CWA has reclaimed some of those subcontracted jobs, reported District 4 Vice President Jeff Rechenbach. The union is working with the company to “whittle down the numbers” — the announced surplus there is 1,400 — and to find ways to make sure that members don’t face involuntary layoff, he said.
Similarly in District 9, Vice President Tony Bixler has been meeting with top company officials of SBC-Pacific Bell to find creative ways to protect jobs while helping the company make it through hard times. Meanwhile, California regulators have been investigating the impact of threatened cutbacks on customer service.
And at SBC’s Southern New England Telephone in Connecticut, CWA’s warnings about threatened service problems have prompted the state attorney general to call for an investigation of the impact of a 300-job cutback. Local 1298 has mounted a public letter campaign to Congress and regulators questioning SBC’s investment in sports stadiums and tournament sponsorships while slashing jobs.
Some major telecom employers have unique problems stemming from mismanagement or even fraudulent practices.
Qwest, for instance, is struggling under new management to survive the mismanagement by its former CEO and ongoing investigations of bookkeeping fraud. CWA is working with political and regulatory bodies to keep workers, shareholders and customers from paying the price for the misdeeds of the former Qwest leadership.
To ease pressures on union jobs, CWA negotiated with Qwest to move up by one year the large pension increase scheduled for July of 2003. This prompted many retirement-eligible members to opt for pensions and open up jobs for others, reported District 7 Vice President John Thompson.
Members at Frontier Communications in Rochester, N.Y. and the Midwest were victimized by the Global Crossing scandal. CWA has joined new owner, Citizens Communications, in bankruptcy proceedings to transfer their pension plan from Global Crossing, and the union has filed a class action suit over the handling of workers’ 401(k) accounts.
AT&T members suffered from years of bungled management under CEO Michael Armstrong, who abandoned his bundled services strategy and eventually sold or spun off the valuable wireless and cable properties for which he had grossly overpaid.
CWA’s job battle at AT&T focuses on trying to reclaim jobs that have been misclassified as management and others lost by the thousands to subcontractors. Right now it is unclear whether a new leadership team coming on the scene will opt for a cooperative or a warlike relationship with the union, according to Vice President Ralph Maly.
Meanwhile, Maly’s office has its hands full trying to cope with the meltdown of Lucent where thousands of jobs have been lost through a combination of factors — poor management and bookkeeping irregularities under the previous leadership team, and now the devastating impact of the high tech-telecommunications recession. Analysts talk of the real possibility of bankruptcy.
CWA has been in negotiations with Lucent to find ways to help the company survive while protecting both current jobs and the retirement benefits of 85,000 retirees. At CWA News press time, prospects for a possible early contract settlement appeared bleak, but exploratory talks were still underway.
At Avaya, Maly reported that layoffs have been avoided among the technical workforce because of the negotiated variable workforce agreement, which lays out terms for employment of retired employees on a part-time basis.
Looking over the telecom landscape, President Morton Bahr recently noted: “In my 41 years of negotiating contracts in this industry, I’ve never seen the marketplace turmoil that exists today. Nor have I seen more urgent job security issues that challenge our creativity and resolve.”
In response to this crisis, “We have to fight on all fronts, working with the companies where we can help make them more successful, but also fighting our employers when they try to force unfair sacrifices on our members as an easy solution, while they shelter themselves from the pain,” he said.