Bell Companies Struck in East; Other Walkouts Averted
About 66,000 workers struck telephone companies in New York and New England shortly before midnight Saturday, but walkouts were averted in some mid-Atlantic states, parts of the Midwest and Southwest.
The Communications Workers of America and Southwestern Bell Corp., serving Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, reached a tentative agreement on a new contract for 48,000 union members nearly an hour before a threatened walkout there at midnight local time.
Systems More Automated
Because the telephone systems are much more automated than they were three years ago before the breakup of the American Telephone & Telegraph system, residential users are not likely to feel much immediate effect from a strike, according to analysts. Management personnel were put on emergency status to take over operations.
Negotiators for the union and Bell Atlantic companies, serving six states, and three Ameritech companies, providing telephone service in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, agreed to continue bargaining.
Pete Catucci, a union vice president in charge of the Bell Atlantic talks, said the two sides agreed to “stop the clock” a half hour before the midnight strike deadline.
“We’re bargaining hard to get an agreement,” Catucci said. But he said the union, representing 40,000 workers, and the company were still apart on four issues--differentials, wages, caps on medical benefits and job retraining.
Bell Atlantic reportedly offered its 52,000 union members a new medical plan late Saturday. A company spokesman, Paul Wood, said the offer “effectively removes a major union obstacle to a settlement.”
Fran Zucker, a union spokeswoman, said union leaders at Nynex Corp., the parent company of New York Telephone and New England Telephone, caucused shortly before midnight and rejected the company’s latest offer. Company negotiators, she said, were discussing a union counterproposal when picket lines went up in New York, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Settlement was reached in the Pacific Telesis region last week, covering more than 40,000 workers in California and Nevada, and more than 60,000 workers in the BellSouth region came to terms on Friday.
The complicated bargaining at five different tables on as many as 40 contracts provided a variety of responses to the midnight strike deadline, all of which affected in one way or another telephone service in 38 states.
