Hit & Run
by Paul Bass - May 27, 2004
For phone-company strikers, this time the target was sitting in Texas, not at home.
The workers walkout was a tale for the new corporate era.
Also: Firefighters flunk drug tests. Worried?
Vinny Stella, a 49-year-old maintenance man from Trumbull, started at Connecticut's phone company 25 years ago. It was called SNET then. He would run into the CEO, Alfred Van Sinderen, in the hallway. They'd say hi.
Today SNET is a divison of of SBC, the nation's second-largest phone company.
"There's a big difference between SNET and SBC," Stella said on a downtown New Haven sidewalk Friday, the first morning of a four-day strike. "We were a family."
"The vice-presidents and CEOs, when you walked on their floor, they'd hold the door for you. Today they're in Texas. When they come up for a big meeting they don't want to know us. This [current dispute] does not lie on [local execs]. The managers here whisper to you. They're all scared of losing their jobs."
Amid the blare of bagpipes and honking car horns, Stella and other strikers talked about bread-and-butter issues in dispute. But they kept coming back to the SNET they knew vs. SBC.
That's what made this past week's four-day walkout by thousands of Connecticut SBC workers different from the four others they've staged since 1971.
The strike ended Tuesday morning with a new contract that offers a compromise on the salary, health and outsourcing issues that divided management and the Communication Workers of America, which represents 5,500 phone workers in Connecticut.
But the strike was about more than those bread-and-butter issues. It revealed how working at the phone company has changed, just as it has at corporations throughout the state bought by out-of-state megacorporations. Employees may be back at work. But they're bitter.
SNET was always considered a caring local company, even at times of labor discord. People longed to work there--for the benefits, the pay, the lifetime job security. They knew who their bosses were, all the way to the top. They felt like part of a company that was part of its community. A company that made money, sure, but valued its workers too. Gave them chances to advance. Extra training. Lots of money to pursue college degrees.
All that changed after San Antonio-based SBC bought SNET after the last strike in 1998.
Like Connecticut insurance and media and bank workers, phone-company employees now toil for faceless, heartless bean-counters with multimillion-dollar bonuses issuing directives from some other state to squeeze workforces and abandon their local communities. Our state's employers have become mere outposts of Corporate America.
Now the message is: You're lucky you have a job.
Even going to the bathroom has changed.
So says one clerical worker with 24 years on the job, who preferred not to give her name.
"The toilet has been leaking for months," she said. "They won't bring a repair person in. Newspaper-quality toilet paper. The bathroom smells. Even the soap is chemical garbage."
Her office's garbage cans used to be emptied daily, but not now. "The place is not clean."
George Nuzzolillo, a network technician from North Branford with 34 years on the job, talked about logging on to the Internet at lunch time.
"You go on a legitimate web site. Say, Delta Airlines. You get a pop-up that says, 'This isn't legitimate business,'" said Nuzzolillo, a network technician from North Branford with 34 years at the company.
"If you're on your lunch break, I don't see what the harm is. They monitor every little thing."
Asked about changing conditions in Connecticut, an SBC spokesman calling from Boston, Seth Bloom, said, "We're not going to talk to you about that."
The union acknowledges that SBC faces financial pressures: a loss of land-line customers to wireless services, intense competition.
In a written statement, SBC CEO Edward Whitacre stressed how the company's negotiating demands compared to what other corporations pay nowadays, not to what his company's workers are accustomed to.
For instance, asking for "modest cost sharing of less than 10 percent" on health benefits "compares very favorably with national averages. On average, most Americans with health insurance pay about 38 percent of the cost of their health care and 90 percent of those with company-provided health care are required to pay a monthly contribution." He calls health care the company's "single-fastest rising cost."
But strikers looked at the 93 percent raise that CEO Edward Whitacre got last year (to a $19.5 million salary, plus a batch of stock options worth $53 million). They looked at SBC's $8.5 billion profit in 2003, the industry's highest. And they wonder why they should be asked to pay more for their health-insurance. Or why SBC insisted, after eliminating union positions, that new jobs be lower-paid and non-union.
Meet the new boss. Not the same as the old boss.
If a child is trapped in a burning building, you don't want a firefighter on drugs on the scene trying to rescue her or put out the flames. Which is why recent events in New Haven's fire department should have people worried.
Three different city firefighters flunked random drug tests held over a two week period this month, according to Assistant Chief Ron Dumas. Under terms of their union contract, the firefighters received two days unpaid suspensions. They had to go to the department's employee assistance program. They can't return to the job until they can prove they've cleaned up.
The three work at different fire stations, Dumas says. He didn't identify the drugs for which they tested positive.
The department started random testing last November, according to Dumas. Since January, two other firefighters have flunked and been suspended. They've since returned to the job.
So five firefighters have flunked tests to date, out of some 60 to 70 who have been tested.
Last year a city firefighter died of a drug overdose.
Does the city force have a drug problem?
"Nothing more than any other population," Dumas says. "In the general population you'll probably see the same amount of usage."
Copyright © 1995-2004 New Mass Media. All rights reserved.