Home > Baby Bell, Union Far Apart Amid Strike Talk
By James S. Granelli
With a Friday strike deadline looming, SBC
Communications Inc. and the union for 100,000 of the
telephone company’s workers - including 30,000 in
California - resume formal contract talks today still
far apart on nagging issues of healthcare benefits and
job security.
Negotiators for SBC and the Communications Workers of
America are scheduled to meet with a federal mediator
in Washington after a week’s break.
The two sides earlier reached a key agreement on
healthcare benefits for retirees. Retiree benefits are
not mandatory bargaining subjects, but the issue had
been a roadblock to working out remaining matters in
the core union contract covering CWA members in SBC’s
13-state region, which includes California.
"We believe we are going to reach an agreement without
a work stoppage," said Walt Sharp, a spokesman for SBC,
which is California’s dominant local phone company.
CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson said the union wouldn’t
necessarily strike at midnight Friday if a contract
wasn’t reached. If negotiations are moving forward, she
said, union members will continue working.
Past contract negotiations have been cordial. The
previous three-year contract, which expired at the end
of March, was reached more than a month before it took
effect. And the CWA has been working with SBC to ease
pricing regulations on the company and the industry.
Nevertheless, SBC is readying a contingency plan
developed over the last year. Managers, supervisors and
vendors will take on extra work in the event of a
strike, Sharp said. Some vendors will probably try to
hire retirees, and the company will make more use of
what it called "interactive Internet solutions" for
customer service.
"Our managers understand that they will be asked to go
the extra mile," Sharp said.
Sticking points in the talks include the company’s
insistence that union members start shouldering more of
their healthcare costs and the union’s insistence that
SBC curtail the number of jobs it shifts to outside
companies, many of them overseas.
The company said its healthcare offer would increase
co-payments, which now range from 4% to 7% of total
medical expenses, to 12%. Union members still would pay
no premium for health insurance, Sharp said.
Co-pays would be required for almost all medical needs
– from doctors’ visits to a three-tiered prescription-
drug payment plan. Sharp would not disclose the dollar
amounts of the proposed co-pays, but said the overall
percentage was well below a national average of 38%.
"Rising healthcare costs are a national problem,"
Johnson said. "Just shifting the costs to the employees
doesn’t solve the situation."
After the company made an initial proposal, the union
made a counter-proposal in mid-April.
The pressure of healthcare insurance is "the single
issue most likely to cause friction between workers and
companies all over the country in the coming months,"
Peter J. Hurtgen, head of the Federal Mediation and
Conciliation Service, wrote in a March 3 commentary for
The Times.
Hurtgen, who oversaw the settlement of the Southern
California grocery strike, called SBC and the CWA in
March to offer his services, and both sides agreed.
The other major issue: jobs.
In the last three years, 20,000 of SBC’s union jobs
were eliminated, most of them in the local wireline
business that has seen demand plummet. Meantime, the
company has been moving high-speed Internet and other
high-tech customer support jobs to overseas companies.
"These are growth areas of the company, and our people
want to move into them," Johnson said.
SBC is offering to guarantee jobs to employees who
would otherwise be laid off when their positions are no
longer needed, Sharp said. A new job might require an
employee to move, but not to another region, he said.
So, for example, a Southern California worker whose job
is being eliminated would be offered work elsewhere in
the state or in Nevada.
Besides the core CWA contract, SBC has several dozen
labor agreements with smaller bargaining units
represented by CWA or other unions. Those union
members, about 16,000 companywide, are not part of the
current talks.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times