As union members from Verizon
Communications trickle back into work after a 17-day strike, a backlog
of more than 250,000 work orders waits to be completed.
erned, the strike actually helped us out in At issue, besides pay and quality of life issues, was the fear jobs would
That could mean a long wait for competitive local exchange carriers and
Internet service providers from Maine to Virginia who depend on Verizon
for telephone, dial up and digital subscriber line services.
A communication to DSL.net Inc., a New
Haven, CT, DSL provider last week explained Verizon’s policy during the
strike, which affected 2.5 million customers:
“Our work stoppage guidelines are that no orders for local service that
require field operations dispatches are to be provisioned to either
wholesale or retail customers…Trouble reports are being handled in the
most efficient way possible, without regard to whether the trouble affects
a retail or wholesale customer.”
Chris Parente, DSL.net director of corporate
communications, said his company’s hands were tied, for the most part,
during the Verizon strike. All they could do, he said, was keep his
customers informed of the progress.
“The result of this strike is that a lot of our customers have a long wait
for DSL service,” Parente said. “The Verizon POPs account for 35 to 40
percent of our business, since the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier is the
one who has to provision our lines. During the strike, all we could do was
keep our customers up-to-date as to what was happening.”
Parente doesn’t know when DSL lines his company ordered will be fulfilled,
and hasn’t been contacted by Verizon officials since the strike began.
Although the strike ended last weekend for union members from the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers and the New York and New England chapters of the Communications Workers of America,
nearly 36,000 members of the mid-Atlantic chapter of CWA held out until
Wednesday night. A contract clause gives employees 72 hours to return to work.
Paul Miller, Verizon spokesman, said many of the workers came back to work
the next day, but not all. As far as catching up with the backlog, it
could mean weeks.
“We won’t be back at 100 percent until Monday,” Miller said. “Because of
the 72-hour window, a lot of the employees from the mid-Atlantic region
won’t be back until Monday. Around 50 percent have shown up for work there
and about 94 percent of the employees in the New England and New York area
have returned to work.
“Verizon is going to great lengths to meet the backlog of orders and will
deal with them on a first come, first served basis. It could take a while
to catch up with the backlog, maybe three-four weeks,” Miller
continued. “So much will depend on the weather. A lot of the jobs are out
in the field and bad weather will slow things down. The last thing we need
right now is a hurricane.”
Murphy’s Law states that anything that could go wrong, will go
wrong. Residents in Florida, Georgia and South and North Carolina have
been wracked by bad weather all week, coming to grips with tropical storm
Debby. But Miller and the Weather
Channel both maintain that the storm front is moving south, out of
Verizon territory.
Martha Sessums, Covad Communications
Group vice president of corporate communications,
said that while the strike didn’t lose her company much money, the impact
will be felt for weeks to come.
“As far as DSL line count, we haven’t lost any money but we’ve had to deal
with relocating our installers throughout the United States to work on DSL
installations at other telephone companies in other parts of the
country. As far as that’s conc
that department, because we were able to put more installers in those
areas,” Sessums said. “We’re now in the process of redeploying those
installers back to their original areas and getting things back to
normal. So it did impact our organization.”
According to Sessums, there is now a bigger backlog of orders at Verizon,
but is confident the matter will be resolved in a timely fashion. The
management team has worked hard with us throughout the whole strike,
Sessums said.
The strike, the second in two years, started as company was beginning its
marketing blitz to promote the Verizon name and getting ready to announce
the $5 billion initial public offering of Verizon Wireless.
be redistributed when the GTE Corp. and
Bell Atlantic Corp. merger becomes a
reality. The union also wanted access to the nonunion workers at the
Verizon Wireless plants.
In the end, the three-year contract calls for a 12 percent wage increase,
along with a 14 percent pension boost. Employees will also get a chance to
own the company with Verizon stock options.
The big one, for union officials anyways, was Verizon’s agreement to allow
union officials to talk with Verizon Wireless workers. It raises a big
concern for other wireless companies like AT&T Corp. and Sprint Corp.,
whose
wireless employees are nonunion. A union presence would cut into operating
costs of the fairly new industry.
Lawrence Babbio, Jr., Verizon vice chairman and president, said in a
release Monday the agreement was good for both sides of the bargaining table.
“We believe this agreement is affordable and prudent and will not affect
Verizon’s financial targets,” Babbio said. “We apologize to any customers
who have been inconvenienced by the strike, and we look forward to having
all our employees back on the job.”
