ATLANTA —After being forced to walk picket lines for six days over AT&T-Southeast’s law-breaking, the Communications Workers and the company called in a federal mediator on August 21 to try to help them hammer out their differences. But the picket lines are staying up.
That’s because the bosses at AT&T-Southeast not only refuse to bargain a new contract for the more than 17,000 workers who toil for the firm but won’t even send anyone with the power to make decisions on new contract provisions.
It also won’t bargain on what the law calls mandatory subjects, such as wages and health care, the union says. And AT&T’s reneging on what few agreements were reached before talks broke down.
Refusal to bargain in good faith breaks the law, formally called committing unfair labor practices, CWA said in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board. Though bargaining technically began in June, the workers were forced to strike on the afternoon of August 16.
CWA Southeastern District Vice President Richard Honeycutt reports the company also sent in “contractors,” aka scabs, and supervisors to try to keep service going amid rising complaints from customers. And one contractor, unnamed, injured a picketing striker in Eads, Tenn., by hitting the striker with his car. Further details on that incident were unavailable.
“We were afraid something like this would happen,” said Honeycutt. “As a result of the strike, AT&T has been sending managers and contractors who do not necessarily have the proper training to work on installations and repairs.”
The customer service reps and maintenance technicians whom the firm forced to strike toil for AT&T-Southeast maintaining business and residential phone lines and services in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The imported supervisors and the scabs are creating an unsafe work environment, too.
“Our members…documented unsafe practices, including failure to wear proper safety equipment, failure to secure ladders and other equipment, putting the worker and nearby vehicles and pedestrians at risk, and failure to mark work areas with safety cones. The public should use caution in these work zones,” Honeycutt added.
The workers have picked up community, union, and political support. Even before the telecom firm forced its workers out, 20 lawmakers, led by Reps. John Garamendi and Linda Sanchez, both D-Calif., wrote to AT&T-Southeast CEO John Stankey at company headquarters in Dallas urging him to bargain in good faith and reach a contract acceptable to the workers.
They called the pact “a matter of national importance.”
“Representing constituents employed by AT&T, we know how important these contract negotiations are to the economic well-being of AT&T employees and, ultimately, the company,” Garamendi, Sanchez, and their colleagues wrote. “While we have heard from our constituents about job losses at AT&T in recent years, we understand that the company has reported strong financial gains of late.”
The union, in a petition to Stankey posted on its website, says AT&T garnered $16 billion in profits in 2023. The AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch, using federal data, reported Stankey earned $26,450,157 that year, with 60% of it in stock awards. That was 193 times the median pay for a company worker that year. The median is the point where half the workers earn more and half earn less.
“AT&T historically served as a key economic driver for our districts both as an employer to thousands of workers and as a leading provider of high-quality telecommunications services,” the lawmakers’ letter continued. “We are hopeful an agreement will be reached in these negotiations that ensures this continues to be the case going forward. Again, we urge AT&T to commit to bargaining in good faith with our constituents employed by the company.”
“We’re more than happy to go back to work and more than happy to serve the customers like we do every other day of the year, but until AT&T starts acting right, we’re going to be here on the picket line because they’re bargaining in bad faith,” Eddie Maresca, President of CWA Local 3603 in Charlotte, N.C., told National Public Radio.
The petition for consumers to sign is at cwa.org/attse-support.
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