Tentative Agreement Reached at Verizon
Verizon Communications and unions representing 50,000 workers reached a tentative agreement Sunday on a new three-year contract as a two-week strike affecting 25 million phone users in the East neared an end.
The agreement was struck with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and one of two bargaining units for the Communications Workers of America covering employees in New York and throughout New England.
Negotiations with another bargaining unit for the CWA--covering more than 35,000 workers in the mid-Atlantic states--continued Sunday evening.
Company and union officials expressed optimism that a tentative accord there would also be reached Sunday night. Verizon said it expected workers to begin returning to their jobs today. But the CWA’s president, Morton Bahr, has not called off its strike anywhere, the union said Sunday night.
The agreement, once ratified by the unions, would replace contracts that expired Aug. 6. Company officials said it would provide workers a 12% increase in wages over the life of the three-year contract, along with improvements in other benefits and job security protections.
“The proposed agreement gives Verizon the flexibility we need to thrive in a highly competitive national marketplace,” said Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., vice chairman and president of Verizon.
As a result of the strike, the company now faces a large backlog of phone repairs and installations. Verizon, the nation’s largest local phone company and wireless carrier, was born of the summer marriage between Bell Atlantic and GTE.
New York-based Verizon said it would not provide further details of the contract until the remaining bargaining unit also had reached an agreement. But the issues that fueled the strike and dominated the protracted negotiations centered on union concerns about shifting work to areas of cheaper labor and mandatory overtime.
The negotiations also became a forum for unions to push for greater ease in trying to organize workers in Verizon’s largely nonunion wireless division. The unions won concessions on that front, with the company agreeing to allow workers to indicate their desire to unionize by signing a card--a quicker process than holding a secret ballot election.
The card check would apply in the former Bell Atlantic territory--12 Eastern states and the District of Columbia--the area covered by the new contracts.
On Saturday, company officials said they had reached agreement with the unions on company proposals that would make it less cumbersome to unionize workers in Verizon’s growing wireless division and had agreed to concessions about how its high-speed Internet connection work will be performed.
The company has struggled during the strike to fill growing numbers of repair requests, estimating that as many as 50,000 customers had no phone service at all.
Company managers and retirees, working in place of thousands of striking technicians, were tackling a backlog of about 92,000 repair requests, Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said Sunday. The replacement workers were clearing about 25,000 to 30,000 requests daily.
