Melissa Bailey Photo
In a sign of another stormy season of contract negotiations, red-clad AT&T workers took to the streets in New Haven as part of a statewide strike.
“What do we want? A contract!” called out a few dozen protestors on a picket line Tuesday outside AT&T’s statewide headquarters at 310 Orange St.
Some 3,200 members of Communication Workers of America Local 1298 refused to go to work Tuesday in protest of what they claim are violations of federal labor law amid a contract dispute, according to CWA President Bill Henderson. The local represents Connecticut workers who deal with AT&T landlines, including cable repairmen, cable splicers, service representatives and operators. Their contract expired April 7. CWA also called a strike Nevada and California, where a contract covering 17,000 AT&T workers also expired on April 7.
“A strike is not in anyone’s best interest,” the company said in a statement issued Tuesday. The company said it has already reached tentative agreements covering nearly 48,000 landline workers who perform the same type of work.
The situation in New Haven got violent over on George Street, where an AT&T replacement worker allegedly rammed her car at four strikers, injuring two of them, according to Ann DeMatteo at the New Haven Register.
Connecticut’s two-day strike centers on an unfair labor practices complaint. The complaint, filed in July with the National Labor Relations Board, alleges violations on two counts.
Local 1298 President Henderson.
First, CWA charges the company has started to force some workers to perform work above their pay grade, in violation of the contract. “Precision technicians” are paid up to $23 per hour to install U-verse, AT&T’s television and Internet package, into people’s homes. As of May 7, the company “unilaterally changed” those workers’ jobs, the complaint reads. The company started sending those precision technicians into businesses to install DSL and troubleshoot networks. Henderson said that work is supposed to be done by business technicians, who make up to $30 per hour.
Second, CWA charges that AT&T refused to bargain on the scope of the work of these precision technicians. That constitutes refusal to bargain in good faith, a violation of the National Labor Relations Act, the union charged. In a July 19 letter, Jonathan Kreisberg, regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Hartford, announced he was opening an investigation into the charges.
AT&T spokesman Marty Richter rejected that charge.
“We have been negotiating in good faith since Feb. 29 in Connecticut and the other regions,” Richter said, “as illustrated by the tentative agreements we’ve reached in other regions. We remain ready to negotiate.”
AT&T reached three new tentative agreements Monday night covering over 22,000 landline workers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, according to Richter.
“These employees are very well compensated, and they will continue to be,” Richter added in an email. “The average AT&T network technician in these contracts makes $133,000 in wages and benefits, and the average AT&T call center representative makes $107,000. We’re not proposing to reduce the wages of any employee in these contracts, or to take away their benefits.
“Our goal throughout these negotiations has been to preserve high quality middle-class careers with wages and health care benefits that are among the best in the country.”
Tuesday’s strike represents a return to a bitter contract fight that ended just two years ago.
Local 1298 engaged in months of public protest during the last negotiations; the contract that expired in April 2009 was finally settled in August 2010. Local 1298 Secretary Miriam DiNicholas said health care and the scope of workers’ jobs are the biggest sticking points of the new contract, in addition to AT&T’s alleged refusal to negotiate about the scope of those jobs.
“We believe we have a strong case—the company has refused to bargain,” she said.
Meanwhile, AT&T’s Richter said the company has been preparing a temporary, non-union workforce to counteract the strike.
“We place a priority on customer service,” he said. “We have been planning for more than two years to handle a potential work stoppage, and we have a substantial contingency workforce of well-trained managers and vendors in place.”