Phone Workers Fight for Place in Wireless Era By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
In what would be one of the biggest strikes in a decade, 85,000 telephone workers on the East Coast are threatening to walk out next weekend in a struggle that, stripped to its essentials, pits old-line labor against the New Economy.
The telephone workers are facing off with Verizon Communications -- the name for the company formed when Bell Atlantic acquired GTE last month -- largely because they fear that the company's widespread use of lower paid, nonunion workers in its fastest growing businesses, most notably wireless phones, will endanger the wages and benefits of unionized workers.
Company officials say they are taking the strike threat seriously because the two unions involved in the dispute, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, have never been shy about striking. In 1998, they struck Bell Atlantic for two days, winning a no-layoff clause and improved pension benefits. And in 1989 they staged a 17-week strike against Nynex, which later merged with Bell Atlantic, rebuffing a company demand to have workers pay monthly health insurance premiums.
"Right now the chances of a strike are better than 50-50," said Morton Bahr, president of the communications workers' union, which represents 72,500 of the workers who might walk out.
The walkout, threatened for 12:01 a.m. next Sunday, could cause problems for 25 million businesses and households stretching from Virginia to Maine. It would involve operators, service representatives and repair workers, and could cause the same inconveniences that local and long-distance customers experienced in previous telephone company strikes: delays in repairs, installing new lines, ordering new phone service and getting questions answered about telephone bills.
The stakes are large because Verizon, (pronounced ver-EYE-zon), with 260,000 employees, has far more workers than any other American telecommunications company and is the nation's largest wireless company. But while close to 80 percent of the more than 120,000 workers in the company's local lines division, which provides local telephone service, are unionized, a mere 46 of the 32,000 workers in Verizon's wireless division are.
The challenge for the two unions is daunting because they are finding it tough to keep pace with a fast-changing company in a fast-changing industry. Indeed, Verizon's unions are struggling to adapt to many developments common throughout the New Economy: new job categories, new types of compensation like profit sharing, and the increased use of contingent workers like temporary hires and independent contractors.
The former Bell Atlantic now owns the telephone companies around the country previously operated by GTE, whose workers will not strike next week because they are covered by a different union contract. Verizon also operates the nation's largest wireless telephone network in a partnership with Vodafone AirTouch, a European company. In addition, Verizon, which long focused on local service as Bell Atlantic, has recently entered the long-distance market in New York state and hopes to win regulatory clearance in other states as well.
In this maelstrom of mergers and reshufflings, of new businesses and new technologies, labor leaders fear unionized workers will be squeezed or even laid off as Verizon attempts to pare labor costs by, for example, contracting out work to nonunion firms.
The main issues in the dispute, union leaders say, are job security, higher pensions, feelings of stress at work, and the union's demand for an easier way to unionize the workers in the company's wireless operations.
Union officials voice fears that if they fail to unionize the wireless workers, Verizon will aggressively shift business -- and jobs -- from its unionized operations to its lower-paying nonunion operations. Union officials complain that many of the more than 5,000 jobs in Verizon's new and fast-growing business installing digital subscriber lines for computers are nonunion.
"The union is looking at a situation where the industry is changing very fast and with the advent of wireless and Internet services and digital subscriber lines, we are battling with the company over keeping that work as union work," said Bob Master, a spokesman for the Communications Workers. "We want to see the industry change and grow, but we want the union to share in that growth and we want those jobs to remain good jobs that pay enough to support families."
The communications workers estimate that Verizon's unionized service representatives are paid an average of $26 an hour, about double the pay of service representatives in the nonunion wireless operations.
The union acknowledges that Verizon's top nonunion craft workers, like line repairmen and installers, are paid $27.30 an hour, on average, 24 cents more than the $27.06 an hour the unionized craft workers earn.
But union leaders say the big difference between union and nonunion workers comes in benefits. The unionized workers pay no premiums for family health insurance coverage, while nonunion workers must pay $600 to $3,500 a year depending on the health plan. And unionized workers have a pension as well as a 401(k) plan, while most nonunion workers have just a 401(k).
In a demand that unions are increasingly making as they seek to organize more workers, the communications and electrical workers want Verizon to allow unionization of its wireless operations through an expedited process known as a card check. In that process, a company agrees to let workers join a union if a majority of employees at a work site signs cards saying they want to join a union. Labor leaders say it is far easier to organize workers through card checks than through elections, which often take months to hold and can bog down in years of litigation.
"Our members understand that if we don't organize the people in wireless, then when the unorganized numbers grow anywhere near the organized, there's a direct threat to the wages and benefits that we achieved over 60 years because the nonorganized are not getting anywhere near what the members are getting," said Mr. Bahr, the union's president.
The unions are also demanding that Verizon pledge not to fight any unionization efforts. As an example of management's anti-union efforts, the communications workers say supervisors at the Verizon Wireless call center in Woburn, Mass., have barred workers from distributing pro-union literature and have asked workers who among them is supporting the unionization drive.
Steven Marcus, a Verizon spokesman, insisted that the company is pro-union, not anti-union, and he talked in nonconfrontational tones, being careful not to stoke the workers' resentment.
"Our goal is we want to be a union-represented company that can compete successfully with many companies in our marketplace that are not unionized," he said.
Worried about the company's plans to cut expenses, the unions are demanding numerous job security provisions, among them a no-layoff clause and restrictions on contracting out work and transferring operations from one state to another. Verizon officials say that to hold down costs and remain competitive, they need to retain the right to contract out work and move operations.
Seeking to ensure that thousands of union members will back a strike, the communications workers' union has held training sessions for more than 700 workers over the last four months. The sessions teach workers how to carry out a strike, and educate them on changes in the industry and the importance of unionizing Verizon's nonunion workers. These trainees are then responsible for mobilizing other union members behind a strike.
For some Verizon workers, a strike cannot come soon enough if it brings about measures to reduce stress on the job. At many call centers, customer service representatives who take orders for new service or answer questions about bills say they are inundated with calls, and that management often req uires them to tack four extra hours onto their shifts.
Patricia Egan, who works in a Verizon facility in Queens answering questions from residential customers, said, "We generally work from 8 in the morning until 4, but often we're forced to work until 8 at night. It wreaks havoc. People go to school and they're forced to miss classes. Many workers are single parents, and this forced overtime is a nightmare. It creates serious problems for their child care arrangements."
She would like the union and company to agree on measures to reduce stress and forced overtime.
Mr. Marcus, the Verizon spokesman, said, "On the stress issue, we recognize that's a concern. We hope we can address it and resolve it."
Verizon's first quarter operating profits were $1.27 billion, but net earnings were $731 million, or 46 cents a share, reduced by a one-time charge related to its investment in Cable & Wireless Communications. Verizon has not yet announced second-quarter earnings, but earlier this month, the company said second-quarter sales rose about 15 percent.