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Marathon talks at Telecom
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August 28, 1998: 1:13 p.m. ET
Union, company reps at U.S. West, SNET return to bargaining table
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Striking union workers at two regional telephone giants remained deadlocked Friday with management over major sticking points of pay and benefits as negotiators prepared to resume talks under federal mediation.
Southern New England Telephone was poised to renew talks Friday with negotiators for 6,300 members of the Connecticut Union of Telephone Workers, who walked off the job at midnight Sunday.
Meanwhile, across the country, in Denver, Colo., a fifth straight day of talks were set to resume between U.S. West and the Communications Workers of America, whose 35,000 field technicians and service personnel struck on August 15 to protest the company's policy of linking pay to performance.
The CWA, which is also negotiating on behalf of its CUTW affiliate in the SNET walkout, represents workers in 13 of the 14 states in U.S. West's territory.
The lone holdout state, Montana, is the home base of 550 technicians and customer service representatives represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. When their union brethren struck 13 days ago, the IBEW agreed to keep bargaining with U.S. West, averting an exodus to the picket lines by its own members.
Now this black-sheep status is in jeopardy, after the IBEW threatened Thursday to strike in Montana starting September 1. On Friday, Clark Spranget, the business manager for IBEW local 226 in Helena, Mont., said he is "cautiously optimistic" that both parties will reach a settlement before then.
"We're making progress at the negotiating table," Spranget said. "We're down to a couple of very tough issues that we've got" to hammer out.
Spranget said inroads had been made on the pay-for-performance issue, a major stumbling block. But he and other officials declined to characterize the substance or mood of the talks, citing a news blackout imposed on the negotiators by a federal mediator.
At U.S. West, David Beige, a company spokesman, said the company and union officials had been convening in a series of 12-hour bargaining marathons, the most recent of which dragged on into the wee hours Friday morning.. The strain of the effort was apparent in Beige's voice in a telephone interview Friday.
Sources close to the talks said the bargainers were expected to pick up where they left off Friday morning.
The strikes at both telephone companies exemplify the growing rifts between workers concerned with safeguarding their jobs and wages, on the one hand, and management faced with the cost-cutting imperatives of the new global economy.
The striking workers at SNET have already rejected a tentative 32-month contract settlement, reached with union leaders on August 7, that would have offered wage increases of 11 percent and a pension benefits increase of 12 percent.
The reason for the rebuff, union officials say, is that the agreement, in the end, failed to directly address the main issues that drove the workers to the picket line in the first place.
These include SNET's so-called "two-tiered" system of setting "widely different" levels of compensation for employees performing the same job, and worker disgruntlement over across-the-board pay scales that are seen to lag the industry standard.
"Even though we know it, and the rest of the world knows it, the company still hasn't reached that understanding," said John Dugan, a CWA negotiator. "We're waiting to see (what happens)…if they move on those (issues), we can get something done."
"Bring Connecticut workers up"
Dugan said one of his workers' primary concerns was ensuring parity with workers at Texas-based SBC Communications Inc., which agreed to acquire SNET earlier this year. The average wage of CWA employees is $38,000 a year.
"We cannot have these lower wages dragging everyone else down," Dugan said. "We've got to bring Connecticut workers up."
He added that the union had begun to tap into its $175 million defense reserve fund, and was prepared to further deplete those reserves before yielding on the core issues.
AT U.S. West, which serves 25 million customers in a territory stretching from Minneapolis to Seattle, 15,000 managers are filling in for striking technicians, operators and service representatives.
The resulting delays in non-essential services, such as directory assistance, have triggered a 300 percent surge of customers onto the company's auxiliary Web site. The company maintains it has been able to handle more than 99 percent of calling volume with no delay.
SNET, Connecticut's largest telephone company, with 2 million customers, has retained essential services by deploying 3,700 managers as operators, technicians and customer service representatives.
The strike has taken on a particularly acrid tone at U.S. West, where both sides have traded accusations. The CWA has accused the company of importing striking workers from Canada to assume the vacant posts of striking workers.
In a complaint earlier this week to the National Labor Relations Board, the CWA contended U.S. West tried to deliberately mislead workers about their rights to continued health-care coverage.
The company dismissed the claim as little more than rumor-mongering, saying it was required under federal labor law to inform employees of their option after coverage expires on August 31.
Meanwhile, union officials have targeted U.S. West's pay-for-performance plan as an ill-devised policy.
"It's not even fully developed, it's unproved, it's untested, there's not even enough (there) to give a value judgment," Spranget said. "It's kind of akin to an experimental aircraft that nobody's flown."
Shares of SNET (SNG) were up 1-1/16 at 67-1/16 Friday, while U.S. West rose 1-3/4 to 51-3/4.
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CWA
US West
SNET
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