Verizon, Mid-Atlantic Workers Reach Deal
Negotiators for Verizon Communications and more than 35,000 telephone workers reached a tentative agreement on a new contract Wednesday night, ending an 18-day strike in six mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia.
The company and the last of three bargaining units settled Wednesday on a three-year contract covering workers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Union representatives for 50,000 other workers in New York and New England already agreed to a package Sunday night. All three contracts still need to be ratified by the unions’ members.
“This settlement secures the future for our members at this company, and it also helps sharpen Verizon’s competitive edge,” said Communications Workers of America President Morton Bahr.
Lawrence T. Babbio Jr., Verizon vice chairman and president, said the agreement “gives us the flexibility we need to compete in the Internet era, satisfying the company’s need to manage its workload while meeting customer demands for outstanding service.”
Workers who had settled over the weekend returned to work Monday to begin tackling a backlog of installation and repair requests. Some in New York stayed off the job Wednesday, honoring picket lines set up by striking workers from the mid-Atlantic region.
About 63,000 trouble orders are still being processed and 200,000 other customers await new service. The company says it will take about a month to clear all orders.
The employees represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Communications Workers of America went on strike Aug. 6, after their contracts expired with Verizon, the newly minted name for the combined Bell Atlantic and GTE company. More than 25 million phone users in the East were affected by the walkout.
Under the tentative agreement, customer service representatives could not be required to work more than 7.5 hours of overtime weekly. Technicians and operators in the mid-Atlantic region would have an eight-hour-per-week cap on mandatory overtime, beginning next year.
All three tentative agreements include a 12% increase in wages over the life of the three-year contracts; options for all employees for purchasing 100 shares of Verizon stock and a 0.7% limit on the number of jobs in any region that can be moved to another area in a year.
