Baby Bell, Union Far Apart Amid Strike Talk

With a Friday strike deadline looming, SBC Communications Inc. and the union for 100,000 of the telephone company’s workers -- including 30,000 in California -- resume formal contract talks today still far apart on nagging issues of healthcare benefits and job security.

Negotiators for SBC and the Communications Workers of America are scheduled to meet with a federal mediator in Washington after a week’s break.

The two sides earlier reached a key agreement on healthcare benefits for retirees. Retiree benefits are not mandatory bargaining subjects, but the issue had been a roadblock to working out remaining matters in the core union contract covering CWA members in SBC’s 13-state region, which includes California.

“We believe we are going to reach an agreement without a work stoppage,” said Walt Sharp, a spokesman for SBC, which is California’s dominant local phone company.

CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson said the union wouldn’t necessarily strike at midnight Friday if a contract wasn’t reached. If negotiations are moving forward, she said, union members will continue working.

Past contract negotiations have been cordial. The previous three-year contract, which expired at the end of March, was reached more than a month before it took effect. And the CWA has been working with SBC to ease pricing regulations on the company and the industry.

Nevertheless, SBC is readying a contingency plan developed over the last year. Managers, supervisors and vendors will take on extra work in the event of a strike, Sharp said. Some vendors will probably try to hire retirees, and the company will make more use of what it called “interactive Internet solutions” for customer service.

“Our managers understand that they will be asked to go the extra mile,” Sharp said.

Sticking points in the talks include the company’s insistence that union members start shouldering more of their healthcare costs and the union’s insistence that SBC curtail the number of jobs it shifts to outside companies, many of them overseas.

The company said its healthcare offer would increase co-payments, which now range from 4% to 7% of total medical expenses, to 12%. Union members still would pay no premium for health insurance, Sharp said.

Co-pays would be required for almost all medical needs -- from doctors’ visits to a three-tiered prescription-drug payment plan. Sharp would not disclose the dollar amounts of the proposed co-pays, but said the overall percentage was well below a national average of 38%.

“Rising healthcare costs are a national problem,” Johnson said. “Just shifting the costs to the employees doesn’t solve the situation.”

After the company made an initial proposal, the union made a counter-proposal in mid-April.

The pressure of healthcare insurance is “the single issue most likely to cause friction between workers and companies all over the country in the coming months,” Peter J. Hurtgen, head of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, wrote in a March 3 commentary for The Times.

Hurtgen, who oversaw the settlement of the Southern California grocery strike, called SBC and the CWA in March to offer his services, and both sides agreed.

The other major issue: jobs.

In the last three years, 20,000 of SBC’s union jobs were eliminated, most of them in the local wireline business that has seen demand plummet. Meantime, the company has been moving high-speed Internet and other high-tech customer support jobs to overseas companies.

“These are growth areas of the company, and our people want to move into them,” Johnson said.

SBC is offering to guarantee jobs to employees who would otherwise be laid off when their positions are no longer needed, Sharp said. A new job might require an employee to move, but not to another region, he said. So, for example, a Southern California worker whose job is being eliminated would be offered work elsewhere in the state or in Nevada.

Besides the core CWA contract, SBC has several dozen labor agreements with smaller bargaining units represented by CWA or other unions. Those union members, about 16,000 companywide, are not part of the current talks.