Bell Strike Has Little Effect on Phone Service
A strike at the nation’s No. 2 phone company, Bell Atlantic Corp., caused some minor delays in service Sunday as union and company negotiators met throughout the day to settle their dispute.
About 73,000 Bell Atlantic operators, customer-service representatives and installers--more than half the company’s work force--walked off the job at 12:01 a.m. Sunday after management and leaders of the Communications Workers of America failed to reach a contract settlement.
There were “reports of scattered delays” in reaching directory assistance and problems in scheduling local installation and repair work for customers in its 12 states and the Washington, D.C., area, the company said. Bell Atlantic has assigned 23,500 nonunion managers to work 12-hour shifts to fill in for the strikers.
However, since much of the Baby Bell’s phone service is automated, there shouldn’t be a problem with calls connecting, Bell executives say. And the strike is not expected to have much impact on callers outside the company’s Northeast region, union and company officials said.
“Some customers [calling directory assistance] aren’t able to get through, but they’re picking up the pace as more come on duty during the day,” Dave Frail, a Bell Atlantic spokesman, said Sunday.
Since Saturday night, negotiators have been meeting in Washington and New York to resolve issues about jobs being shifted to new nonunion subsidiaries, which pay substantially less.
According to one estimate, as many as two-thirds of all new jobs are being posted in these subsidiaries.
“They are trying to shrink the areas of the company which are union represented,” said Candace Johnson, a spokeswoman for the CWA. “It’s an issue of maintaining good jobs with good quality and good management.”
For example, union officials say customer-service jobs are being transferred to a new unit called Bell Atlantic Plus, which hires through a temporary agency and pays about $280 a week, versus the $740 a week that a union member would make.
In a statement, CWA President Morton Bahr said the organization also is concerned about making sure union workers are represented in new growth areas such as Internet services, multimedia communications, data networking, long distance and others.
The strike involves workers in Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington.
Executives of Bell Atlantic, the nation’s second-biggest phone company after long-distance giant AT&T; Corp., counter that they have presented the union with a fair offer that would expand the number of union jobs at the company, particularly in the high-tech arena. Bell Atlantic is the nation’s largest local phone company.
Hal Perin, a union steward in Manhattan, was surprised by the strike. “I didn’t expect this,” he said. “We helped them with the [Bell Atlantic-Nynex] merger and then everything changed. They’re trying to give our work away to nonunion workers.”
Picket lines were up in Manhattan, Albany, Schenectady and Menands, N.Y., and Charleston, W. Va. Union officials said the pickets would remain 24 hours a day until a new contract is signed.
The negotiations also come at a time when the telecommunications industry is facing stiffer competition and waves of consolidation. Last month, Bell Atlantic agreed to buy GTE Corp. for $66.66 billion.
The company is also holding talks with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. About 13,500 Bell Atlantic workers belonging to the IBEW agreed to continue working temporarily under the old contract, provided they would not have to cross a picket line, according to union officials.
Meanwhile, Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp. avoided a similar strike by reaching a tentative agreement with the CWA before the deadline of midnight Sunday. Like Bell Atlantic, BellSouth was one of the Baby Bell local phone companies created in the breakup of AT&T; in the 1980s.
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Times wire services were used in compiling this report.
