Strike Looms as Bell Atlantic Talks Hit Snag
Union negotiators suspended bargaining with Bell Atlantic on Sunday, and local union leaders representing 52,000 of the company’s workers met in the capital to discuss a possible strike.
Talks resumed at two other regional telephone companies: Ameritech and Pacific Telesis. And negotiators early Sunday reached tentative agreement on new contracts at two other Baby Bells: Southwestern Bell and BellSouth.
“The clock is running, and we can pull the plug any time,” Vince Maisano, district vice president of the Communications Workers of America, said of the Bell Atlantic talks.
Maisano said the union has authorization from its members to call a strike, but the union and Bell Atlantic managers agreed to go back to the table Tuesday, delaying any chance of a strike until after that.
He said that in two bargaining sessions Sunday, the company “blocked progress by placing demands on the table” for union concessions in various areas.
However, company spokesman Jay Grossman said: “We think what we have put on the table is a very good, very competitive package, and we look forward to resuming negotiations.”
Contracts between the regional phone companies and the unions expired at midnight Saturday.
The CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers represent operators, cable installers, switching equipment operators and Yellow Page advertising salesmen.
The three companies without new contracts serve customers in 13 states and the District of Columbia.
The new three-year agreement between Southwestern Bell and the CWA includes a basic wage increase of about 12% over three years and improvements in group health insurance, pension benefits and job classifications, CWA spokesman Jennings Wooldridge said early Sunday in St. Louis.
“The (union) committee was pleased with it. . . . They just hammered it out. It came down to the final hour,” Wooldridge said, noting that the tentative agreement was subject to approval by union members.
Southwestern Bell is the only one of the five regional companies that has a previous agreement with the union barring a strike or lockout, but company and union spokesmen in other cities said strikes also appeared unlikely.
At BellSouth, based in Atlanta, a new contract covering 61,840 workers provides a wage increase of 11.3% over the three-year life of the contract plus annual cost-of-living adjustments.
The tentative contract also provides more job security, including limits on the amount of contract work BellSouth can give non-union workers, special leave for employees whose jobs are classified as surplus and guarantees of income supplements if a worker is transferred to a lower-scale job.
