In My Opinion: AT&T Sets a Hard Tone for Contract Talks

More than at any time in its history, now is when AT&T really needs the support of its employees and its union.
The core long distance company, while still quite profitable, faces shrinking market share, especially in the residential area, and heavy competition as it looks to expand in the more lucrative business data communications field. The growing wireless unit already has been severed from AT&T, and the company is now selling its broadband cable enterprise to Comcast.

Certainly, maintaining stable labor relations and keeping the most skilled and experienced workers are vital to the company’s success in these turbulent times.

So here is what AT&T is doing in the current round of contract talks to win the cooperation and goodwill of its dedicated CWA workers.

• The company admits that it is training a cadre of technicians from India to work as strike breakers, presumably from work stations in their home country.
  
• Management has put a deal buster on the bargaining table in the form of major health care givebacks including a demand for premium sharing.
  
• Their response to our members’ job concerns is to state that no one today should expect job security.

When we recently found out about AT&T’s training of Indian nationals as network technicians, members attending last month’s Legislative-Political Conference raised the issue with members of Congress during their visits to Capitol Hill. Many lawmakers were concerned about the prospect of these workers having remote access to the entire network infrastructure.

When inquiries from Congress flooded AT&T headquarters, the company took an extraordinary action. In an electronic bulletin to every employee, AT&T in effect issued a “gag order” against talking to reporters or government officials. Management warned that discussing “company business” with such people is a violation of its self-imposed “Code of Conduct,” and cause for possible discipline.

This attempt to intimidate our members and our union from exercising our right to speak out and lobby on critical issues affecting our jobs is an incredible display of corporate arrogance, especially coming in the Enron Age, with widespread investigations into secret dealings and abuse of employees by major companies.

As for the training of the Indian workers, when an AT&T spokesman confirmed that this was part of its strike contingency plan, I called on Senator Edward Kennedy and other key leaders to investigate the matter as a possible violation of U.S. immigration policies. I’m certain these workers weren’t allowed into the country to become strike breakers, and it is likely that these are laid off workers who were given H1-b visas to come here to work in the high tech industry.

As talks opened, AT&T negotiators set an unhelpful tone by lecturing us about supposedly rejecting an earlier contract extension offer from the company. In fact we never rejected that offer, but merely offered a counter proposal to include job security issues as part of any contract extension talks. CWA is always eager to enter early negotiations and attempt to reach a fair settlement before contract expiration, as we have done many times.

AT&T flatly refused to discuss job issues at that time, while trying to convince our members that the union was being unreasonable. But here’s what AT&T failed to mention in its press releases and employee bulletins. The company earlier had agreed, as part of a settlement with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service worked out in the CEO’s own office, that in this round it must negotiate with us about non-union workers doing our jobs.

When we called this to the attention of a top AT&T executive, his sheepish reply was: “We forgot.” I guess that tells us something about AT&T’s attention span concerning our issues.

That same executive told us that no one at AT&T, including management, should expect to have job security. That gave us an opportunity to mention that the man at the top, CEO Michael Armstrong, has written himself a deal where he cannot be removed for at least three years from his new position as chairman of AT&T Comcast.

In late March, AT&T laid down a demand that could really galvanize our members for a fight. The company is demanding a range of health care givebacks, including premium payments by workers amounting to as much as $1,560 a year by 2006, $200 hospital co-payments per admission and elimination of out-of-network coverage.

As AT&T surely knows, it was a similar demand that led to one of CWA’s bitterest strikes, against NYNEX in 1989.

We will do everything possible to reach a peaceful settlement, which is certainly in the best interest of the company as well as the workers we represent. If that isn’t possible, the entire resources of this union will be behind our AT&T members, who are determined to fight for their future this year.