SBC CWA Strike Imminent

Tmack writes "SBC union workers are preparing (again) to strike after negotiations have broken down between CWA and SBC. What this means to the average person? As long as the strike is taking place, orders for new service and repair of existing services with SBC will be delayed as only non-union workers and temps will be around to complete the work. Latest word is the strike is now planned for Friday night through next Tuesday. Check here(1), here(2), and here(3) for more info."

Re:Who? What?

[Taius]

The union employees at SBC want the company to guarantee them job security (against all the outsourcing) and to guarantee their healthcare premiums won't rise.

I'm a SBC manager, and I've already been notifed to transport to my strike location, so I guess I'll be fixed your DSL as of Friday. :)

Re:Who? What?

[Kiryat Malachi]

SBC = (Something - Southern, maybe?) Bell Company, one of the Big Bells, provides service throughout the Midwest.

CWA = Communications Workers of America, big union including all your telco repair folks.

Re:Uhh

[ewhac]

CWA: Communications Workers of America: a labor union.

SBC: Southwestern Bell Corporation (nee Pacific Bell): an evil, money-grubbing RBOC/ILEC :-).

Schwab

Re:What's SBC?

[LostCluster]

Southwestern Bell Company. They're the West Coast equal to what Verizon has on the East Coast, and they call their cellular company Cingular.

Re:Who? What?

[John Courtland]

SBC is Southwestern Bell Corporation.

Re:Who? What?

[Joney]

Southwestern

Southern would be BellSouth

Re:Who? What?

[JabberWokky]

From what I've gathered, SBC is the major local telco for everywhere in the United States except the east coast. There are competitors, but SBC pretty much owns the majority of US local loops from the midwest through to the west coast. They are the equivelent of the Northeast's Verizon (I think; never lived or done business in the NE) and the South's BellSouth (who cuddled with AT&T awhile back).

I'll freely admit I gave up on tracking the buyouts and mergers, but that seems to be the layout of the local carriers in the US. SBC is a biggie, at least by geography.

--
Evan

Re:Gotta love the unions

[Kiryat Malachi]

Actually, the union isn't saying that.

They're saying:

"We want a raise. If you don't give us a raise, NO ONE will come to work."

Its totally legit, and you can do it at your job legally as well. However, at your job, unless you can:

a) Convince no one else to show up if you don't get what you want/get fired.
b) Convince any potential replacements that they'll get a better paycheck if they join your strike.

Then management will laugh at you.

Unions are a method of using the collective legal power of the workers (the threat of withholding labor) to counterbalance the economic power of the corporation (the threat of withholding a job/paycheck from a single worker).

Re:Who? What?

[astrokid]

CWA: Communications Workser of America
SBC: Southwestern Bell Company(?)
Taken from: http://www.sbc.com/gen/press-room?pid=5074
In 1999, SBC Communications Inc., introduced the SBC brand to its customers with the SBC Global Network tag line. And last year, the company took the big step of adding SBC, in a dominant way, to its regional brand names.
The time is now right for the company to move to a single national brand -- SBC. The brand change gives SBC a more unified presence throughout its markets, making it easier for customers to find and do business with SBC companies across geographic boundaries and product lines. The move to a single national brand also unifies offerings previously marketed through regional brands such as SBC Southwestern Bell, SBC Pacific Bell, SBC Nevada Bell and SBC Ameritech.
The brand change underscores SBC's evolution from a regional company into the nation's premier source for communications services.

Re:So what?

[LostCluster]

SBC stands for Southwestern Bell Company, which is the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) for much of the Western USA, including California and Texas which have major datacenters. CWA stands for Communications Workers of America, which is the labor union that represents most of their technical workers.

It's news because it affects a good chunk of the IT industry. Basically, if the CWA goes on strike, SBC's ability to resolve field-wiring issues will suddenly be reduced to management employees who aren't represented by the union. This means any line noise or wire failure issue that happens on local phone line loops within their territory will take much longer than usual to be resolved... leading to potential longer-than-usual disruptions to communication services that rely on local copper loops.

Re:A little locale

[LostCluster]

How would NYC and the whole East Coast feel if Verizon's people went on strike? That's who SBC is over there...

See, now you see why this is newsworthy. Even if you're not over there, if you depend on reaching something or someone over there, you're a bit nervous because if for any reason a phone line were to go down, a strike would make it take longer to bring back up.

Re:Say what you will...

[Anonymous Coward]

Non union workers are normally exploited. Sure there are some bad unions, but there are many more bad corporations out there. Just read one of the articles, it said SBC made 8.5 Billion in PROFIT last year. And now they're bitching about health care costs?! Screw this, I'm moving to Canada.

Re:What's SBC?

[ranger714]

Actually, SBC is one of the four major RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Companies, the biggest of the Baby Bells)...

They started as SBC (Southwestern Bell Company) in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri, then started buying other Baby Bells. They bought SNET (Connecticut), Ameritech (Illinois, Wisconson, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio) and recently PacBell/Nevada Bell (California and Nevada).

Verizon covers most of the rest of the New England states and also Kentuky, West Virginia and Virginia.

BellSouth covers the US South, with North & South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

Qwest (formerly USWest) covers the US West and Northwest, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, North & South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.

There's a few other Local Exchange Carriers around, but they're generally minor, and Verizon has some odd-ball areas in Southern California, Florida and a couple other places that used to be GTE areas.

The union position, press release and game

[David Hume]

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) [cwa-union.org] has issued a press release, Communications Workers Set Strike at SBC Involving 100,000 Workers at Midnight Tomorrow [cwa-union.org]:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Communications Workers of America announced that a 4-day strike involving 100,000 union employees of SBC in 13 states will begin at 12:01 a.m. local time in each time zone on Friday, May 21. Workers will return to their jobs at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, May 25.

Among key issues in the contract dispute, CWA members are seeking to strengthen their employment security, including gaining access to new jobs in growth areas of the company, and to preserve their health care benefits in the face of substantial cost-shifting demands by SBC management.

National bargaining that has been taking place between the parties in Washington, D.C. over health care, wages, pensions and employment security will cease, and these issues will now be referred back to the four regional tables in New Haven, Conn., Chicago, Austin, Tex., and Pleasanton, Calif.

"We appreciate the hard work of Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Director Peter Hurtgen in helping us try to work out an agreement on these issues, but unfortunately these efforts have failed to achieve a settlement," said CWA President Morton Bahr.

"We are making this a limited job action right now to drive it home to SBC that our members are serious about securing their future at SBC," said Bahr. "We know that a prolonged strike could cause a loss of major customers and do significant damage to the company, and hopefully that can be avoided."

CWA also is ratcheting up other mobilization activities in the field and is being supported by the AFL-CIO and other major unions in mounting a carrier-switch campaign that potentially could shift substantial business from SBC to another union carrier, AT&T, which operates in 11 of the SBC states. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka personally is spearheading carrier-switch efforts aimed at labor organizations and the 5 million union families who are SBC customers. Customers are being asked to give CWA their "proxy" to implement a carrier switch if the union deems it necessary.

CWA members, who have lost 29,000 jobs at SBC over the past three years, are seeking access to the new growth jobs in Internet data services, installation of Wi-Fi hotspots, voice over the Internet (VOIP), DSL broadband and other areas. Virtually all of this SBC work, amounting to thousands of jobs, is being outsourced, including going offshore to countries such as India and the Philippines.

"SBC continues to refuse to give this work to our members, the frontline workers who have built SBC into the nation's most profitable telecom company," said Bahr. SBC's profits last year were more than $8 billion.

CWA also noted that SBC's latest bargaining proposal called for members to receive no base wage increase upon settlement, but instead receive a one-time lump sum payment of 4 percent. A cash payment instead of a 3 percent base wage increase equates to a savings to SBC of more than $1 billion over four years.

"Incredibly, SBC wants to take $1 billion out of our members' pockets in wages, not to pay for rising health costs, but just to fatten its profits. At the same time, SBC is still demanding that workers also start paying tens of millions more out of pocket for their health care," Bahr stated.

Negotiations began in mid-February. These contracts cover SBC workers in Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, California and Nevada.

The CWA also offers a See-n-Say with CWA Game [cwa-union.org].

Re:Who? What?

[LostCluster]

From the orignal "Baby Bells" formed by the AT&T breakup, the resulting companies have been allowed to remerge and now there are four distinct ILECs left standing, Qwest (North-West), Verizon (North-East), SBC (South-West) and BellSouth (South-East).

Re:Story published to encourage union bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been to a Wal-Mart lately? Wal-Mart doesn't pay its workers anywhere close to a working wage. And you can forget about health care or other benefits. You normally have to work there for 2 years before they kick in, and Wal-Mart always seems to find a way to downsize you about a month before that.

What this is REALLY about...

[Anonymous Coward]

This strike has to do with 'job security' you know, that thing that doesn't exist? These guys that are going to strike are bitching that
1) They are being outsourced by the next gen techno wonks (IP, VoIP, DSL, vs TDM DS0, etc)
2) SBC won't give them iron clad guarntees that they will have a job over the next 5 years, doing what they have been doing for the last 20...
3) Thier only legitimate bitch, I think, is that they arn't being offered a choice to train up to support the next gen stuff... That would be very cool, and we are doing that with the old telco guys at the CLEC I work at, they are all learning IP routing, Internet and VoIP at this very minute, so they won't be obsolete when everyone starts ordering SIP truncks instead or PRIs for their PBXs!

FYI, SBC = Southwestern Bell Company, the evil empire that purchased pac-bell and ameritech to control a very large portion of the local copper in the south and western United States.

This strike will affect not only Bell customers, but also all the CLECs that rely on reselling SBC infrastructure (like DSL, T1s, PRIs, etc)... Those orders will not be fullfilled, costing not only SBC money, but also all the CLECs and ISPs that rely on them. Which is why, IMHO, it is big deal.

Re:So what?

[bug506]

It's a minor point, but they've actually changed [bizjournals.com]their name to "just" SBC, since they no longer cover just the Southwest.

This is like America On-Line becoming "just" AOL to make it more international, and Kentucky Fried Chicken becoming "just" KFC to de-emphasize the fried part (or, if you are inclined to believe such things, because what they serve is not really chicken [snopes.com]. :))

For a while, they kept regional names whenever they bought out a phone company, but they've dropped those too now. So when they bought Pacific Bell, they kept it as "SBC Pacific Bell." Now it's all just "SBC." This will be familiar to anyone who paid attention when they changed PacBell Park in San Francisco to SBC Park.

Re:A little locale

[taniwha]

and California/Nevada too (the subsumed Pactell a while back)

Re:Who? What?

[Quattro Vezina]

SBC = (Something - Southern, maybe?) Bell Company, one of the Big Bells, provides service throughout the Midwest.

Well, SBC/SWBell has been the local phone provider in my area since I was born, so I should know this...

SBC used to be Southwestern Bell, up until 1998, when they officially shortened their name to just SBC--technically, it doesn't stand for anything now, but it sounds like it's supposed to be from Southwestern Bell Corporation. It wasn't even a common nickname for the company...they were usually called SWBell or SWB until the name change.

The name change came not long after they bought Pacific Bell, Ameritech, and Southern New England Telecommunications (actually, I didn't know this part until I looked it up on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]).

Re:Convenient Timing, that...

[LostCluster]

Cingular is not merging with AT&T. They're merging with AT&T Wireless which was spun off from the mothership AT&T years ago in the same move that created Lucent (now Avaya) and AT&T Broadband (now part of Comcast). SBC will pick up a right to use the AT&T Wireless brand for no more than six months, so absolutely any sign anywhere that reads AT&T Wireless will be getting rebranded Cingular rather quickly. The AT&T long distance company has nothing to do with this.

Therefore, SBC will not be aquiring much help in getting local loops fixed... the only local loop AT&T Wireless is concerned with is cell towers. Cingular and AT&T Wireless operate on the same technologies, so they'll have no compatiblity issues taking on the existing AT&T Wireless customers onto the Cingular networks. They basically want AT&T Wireless so that Cingular can mark off any where AT&T has set up a GSM tower up as already done on their GSM conversion effort.

Still, the union's timing in light of a merger close is exactly what they're swinging for. Cheapen the company as the merge closes, and SBC is out money if they cave, and out money if they don't cave. Sad when a business deal heads into mutually destructive territory...

Re:opinion of SBC from a retiree

[Eravau]

The retiree benefits and the outsourcing/contracting issues are some of the major things this strike is about.

SBC is talking about raising the copays on insurance to double our triple what they are now. It's also talking about cutting phone concessions (discounts) all together for retirees..and possibly current employees. That's a lot of extra cost to add to anybody's monthly bills...but moreso to a retired person who isn't getting any raises anytime soon.

The other half is the outsourcing of new jobs. New technology areas such as DSL and WiFi aren't being opened to the current technical and phone support staff. They're all being outsourced to contractors...and for phone support...India. So the CWA is pushing to open those areas...and reduce the cutting of current employees.

You can see more details at CWA's web site [cwa-union.org].

Re:Who? What?

[therblig]

They have a few big issues. I have talked to both a union person and my SBC account rep about it as well.

Some of the union gripes are that SBC is outsourcing jobs instead of giving the jobs in new areas to union employees, so the union wants some job guarantees. Another union gripe is that they currently pay 4-7% in copays (no premiums) for health insurance, and SBC wants to raise it to 7-11%.

SBC is also using this as a stick to beat the feds with, because they claim that they have to support the CLEC's by leasing them their lines at less than it costs to maintain them, so if the feds give them some pricing relief, they will reciprocate with the unions.

As a customer of both CLEC's and SBC, I hope SBC loses on the feds front. The service I get from the CLEC is vastly superior to SBC's service, even when the CLEC leases the line from SBC. Presumably, it is because with SBC, we're small fish, big pond, whereas with the CLEC, we're big fish, small pond, though I think SBC's problems are systemic.

Re:Who? What?

[Eravau]

SBC (not an acronym, their name) is the parent company of what used to be Southwestern Bell, Ameritech, Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell, SNET, Cingular (along with Bell South), SBC Yahoo!, and are also partial owners of several international telecom interests (like TelMex).

Re:This will have a stronger impact than you think

[Tmack]

Very well put, I should have added that CLEC's are not immune from this at all to the original submission. As an employee of another CLEC that depends on SBC for local loops, I can second all your claims of "underhanded" practices. The "no trouble found" and other bogus trouble ticket resolutions led to successful legal action against them to reclaim said charges, as well as fees for doing so in the first place. Since that, things have gotten better, but it still happens. At one install our tech found the NID card (smartjack card) in the slot but not seated. He pushed it in to seat it properly but the circuit still did not come up. Once SBC dispatched, the remote tech actually told me that the companion card in the RT (remote terminal, the big box where a neighborhood usually gets brought together to be sent back to the collo over fewer larger capacity circuits) had to be turned on at the same time as the SmartJack card so they can properly synch, and if the SmartJack is removed, the RT card has to be reset. Basically what he told me is if the end of the circuit looses power, gets reset, or takes enough errors to drop, even if for a second, someone would have to dispatch out and re-sync the RT. Its about like saying, if you unplug an ethernet cable from one computer, you have to go reboot the switch for it to work again.

Tm

Unions are more than just workers getting together

[mc6809e]

Labor union officials enjoy many extraordinary powers and immunities that were created by legislatures and the courts. Union officials claim to rely on the support of rank-and-file workers. Yet, they clamor in the political arena to secure and expand their government-granted powers, including the powers to shake down workers for financial support and even to wage campaigns of violent retaliation against non-union employees.

The following list of special privileges reveals the extent to which union bosses have rigged our nation's labor laws in their favor.

Privilege #1: Exemption from prosecution for union violence.
The most egregious example of organized labor's special privileges and immunities is the 1973 United States v. Enmons decision. In it, the United States Supreme Court held that union violence is exempted from the Hobbs Act, which makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion. As a result, thousands of incidents of violent assaults (directed mostly against workers) by union militants have gone unpunished. Meanwhile, many states also restrict the authority of law enforcement to enforce laws during strikes.

Privilege #2: Exemption from anti-monopoly laws.
The Clayton Act of 1914 exempts unions from anti-monopoly laws, enabling union officials to forcibly drive out independent or alternative employee bargaining groups.

Privilege #3: Power to force employees to accept unwanted union representation.
Monopoly bargaining, or "exclusive representation," which is embedded in most of the country's labor relations statutes, enables union officials to act as the exclusive bargaining agents of all employees at a unionized workplace, thereby depriving employees of the right to make their own employment contracts. For example, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, the Federal Labor Relations Act (FLRA) of 1978, and the Railway Labor Act (RLA) of 1926 prohibit employees from negotiating their own contracts with their employers or choosing their own workplace representatives.

Privilege #4: Power to collect forced union dues.
Unlike other private organizations, unions can compel individuals to support them financially. In 28 states under the NLRA (those that have not passed Right to Work laws), all states under the RLA, on "exclusive federal enclaves," and in many states under public sector labor relations acts, employees may be forced to pay union dues as a condition of employment, even if they reject union affiliation.

Privilege #5: Unlimited, undisclosed electioneering.
The Federal Election Campaign Act exempts unions from its limits on campaign contributions and expenditures, as well as some of its reporting requirements. Union bigwigs can spend unlimited amounts on communications to members and their families in support of, or opposition to, candidates for federal office, and they need not report these expenditures if they successfully claim that union publications are primarily devoted to other subjects. For years, the politically active National Education Association (NEA) teacher union has gotten away with claiming zero political expenditures on its IRS tax forms!

Privilege #6: Ability to strong-arm employers into negotiations.
Unlike all other parties in the economic marketplace, union officials can compel employers to bargain with them. The NLRA, FLRA, and RLA make it illegal for employers to resist a union's collective bargaining efforts and difficult for them to counter aggressive and deceptive campaigns waged by union organizers.

Privilege #7: Right to trespass on an employer's private property.
The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 (and state anti-injunction acts) give union activists immunity from injunctions against trespass on an employer's property.

Privilege #8: Ability of strikers to keep jobs despite refusing to work.
Unlike other employees, unionized employees in the private sector have the right to strike; that is, to refuse to work while keeping their job. In some

Re:NOT DirecTV

[Anonymous Coward]

So why, then, has every SBC rep I've spoken with for the last couple months tried to sell me DirecTV?

This article will explain it:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/ 04_21 /b3884059.htm

For more information (and where I found this link), try this Google search:
http://news.google.com/news?q=sbc%20direc tv

FYI: Rupert Murdoch (Fox, News Corp.) owns DirecTV.

Could the service get any worse?

[dcavanaugh]

I lose my SBC DS1 line every time it rains. They fumble and bumble, I lose a day's work, and my CEO gets grumpy. Eventually, the water evaporates and all of a sudden, it's "No trouble found". I don't see how a strike would change anything.