Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 3, 1995 TAG: 9508030023
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The labor contract between Bell Atlantic Corp., which provides telephone service in six mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia, and the Communications Workers of America expires at midnight Saturday. Union members have authorized the union's leadership to call a strike if efforts fail at the bargaining table.
Prospects of reaching an agreement before Saturday night are unclear. Pete Catucci, a CWA vice president, said labor and management are further apart at this late stage than any time in his recollection, which covers two decades of contract talks. The current talks have been under way since mid-June.
Bell Atlantic spokesman Paul Miller, however, said the company is confident of reaching an agreement. The talks always come down to the last minute, he said.
The major issues involve wages, job security and health care both for retirees and active workers. The CWA contract covers workers throughout Bell Atlantic's organization, including operators, technicians, linemen and clerks. In Virginia, the contract covers 6,650 workers, or 85 percent of the company's work force. But because Virginia is a right-to-work state, not every worker covered by the contract is a member of the union.
Should a strike be called, Bell Atlantic plans to continue operating with managers and retired managers performing the work of strikers. Initially, the public wouldn't notice much of a difference, but over a period of 10 days to three weeks, the company's service would begin to deteriorate, predicted Larry Akers, president of CWA Local 2204, which represents about 875 Bell Atlantic workers in Southwest Virginia, from Roanoke to Cumberland Gap.
"What we're concerned about is, we feel this may be a lengthy [strike] if we have to go out," Akers said. The CWA's last strike against Bell Atlantic, in 1989, lasted three weeks.
The union is seeking wage increases similar to those it won earlier with AT&T and Nynex Corp of New York. Those increases range from 3 percent to 4 percent a year over three years and also include yearly lump sum payments of $500 to $1,800.
Bell Atlantic operators now earn $27,500 to $30,500 a year, and service technicians, including installers and repairmen, earn between $39,200 and $42,000, Miller said. "Our workers are paid extremely well. They are paid better than our competition and ... our potential competition," he said.
Bell Atlantic has offered the CWA 2 percent raises in the first two years of a new contract and less than that in the third year, Catucci said. The company, he said, has been "poor-mouthing" at the bargaining table despite the fact that it reported earnings of $1.4 billion last year before an accounting adjustment.
Bell Atlantic Chairman Raymond Smith made $2.01 million last year in direct and deferred compensation. Miller said that was 18 percent less than in 1993, but the union said it doesn't take into account the value of stock options Smith has been granted, valued at $11 million.
Besides securing an across-the-board raise for all Bell Atlantic workers, a local bargaining goal is to raise Southwest Virginia union members from the bottom of the company's four-tier pay scale, Akers said.
The union is not asking that Southwest Virginia workers be on the same pay scale as workers in Northern Virginia, where the cost of living is higher. But it believes living costs in Southwest Virginia are comparable with those in Richmond, where company workers make more, Akers said. A cable splicer in Richmond is paid $787.50 a week, and those in Southwest Virginia earn $750, the company said.
Local issues are being worked out at a separate bargaining table and are not going well either, said Doug Thompson, an aide to Catucci.
A concern for Akers locally as well as an issue nationally is job security. "The company keeps contracting out work ... eroding the job base," Akers said.
Over the past 10 years, Bell Atlantic has reduced its work force dramatically, partly through technological innovations and partly through subcontracting work, Akers said. The company is moving toward a disposable work force; that creates a lot of stress for union members, not knowing whether they have a future with the company, he said.
Miller responded that "the company is engaged in more and more competition every day, and we're doing whatever we can to ensure there is a future for the company, and that translates into job security."
The union wants the company to agree to cut the use of subcontractors before it lays off full-time employees, Thompson said. The company's increasing use of subcontractors, he said, is also a quality issue because regular workers often have to follow behind subcontractors and clean up their mistakes.
The union also wants Bell Atlantic to offer new jobs at company subsidiaries to company workers before it offers them to outsiders, Thompson said. The CWA questions why the company thinks it necessary to create nonunion subsidiaries to do things such as stringing fiber-optic cable for the company's new video dial-tone service, he said.
Miller said it's the company's policy not to conduct bargaining in the media.
Bell Atlantic also is asking that workers and union retirees start paying a portion of their health insurance premiums, something they have not done. The premium payment would amount to 2 percent of the pensions of retirees, Thompson said.
During the last contract talks, the union established a labor-management committee to deal with rising health care costs. Through the use of managed care, the company's costs are less now than at the start of the current contract, Thompson said.
Bell Atlantic already has reached an agreement with union workers in New Jersey and part of Pennsylvania who are members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. It provides yearly raises of about 3 percent. The CWA contract covers workers in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia.
by CNB