CWA/AT&T SW Bargaining Report #10
The Union Bargaining team met with the Company today.
The Union passed fourteen additional proposals that would renew and continue several MOA’s that are beneficial to our members that included: MOA for protections for expedited arbitrations, MOA for arbitration and internal appeals process, MOA for Four-Day Work Week, MOA for Monitoring and MOA for electronic dues authorization to name some of the highlights.
The Company passed us eight proposals to Appendix J supplemental agreements in which the only movement was for surplus notification from 3 weeks to 4 weeks. They rejected our proposal to drop temp employees from 36 to 24 months and countered with a retrogressive proposal to raise it to 48 months before an employee could reach regular employee status. They also rejected language that would drop assigned overtime to 9 hours to match the core contract and dropped an hour from 14 to 13 hours. They completely rejected our attempt to add double time on overtime past 9 hours. The Company did pass proposals to keep personal days, additional payments, and employment security in Appendix J the same.
All in all, we have received five proposals from the Company so far that would be retrogressive language from the current language we had when we started bargaining two weeks ago. This is a real slap in the face to our membership!
Today’s meeting ended with the Union rejecting the Company’s proposal to upgrade Prem Techs to CSTs on a temporary basis through an MOA indefinitely if and when they choose to do so. We strongly believe that the Company should be opening job requisitions and allowing these employees to bid on these positions the proper way. This Company continues to use Temporary Employees or Temporary Upgrades as a crutch to not provide our members with real opportunities in better paying jobs. CEO Stankey continues to talk about the amount of broadband buildout this Company plans to do; all we want to do is use our expertise and skills to install, service and maintain this network.
While we agree with the Company that securing 10 TA’s so far and protecting some of our current language is definitely a priority for us, we don’t believe it’s progress on some of our members' issues. To date none of these TA’s address those issues.
We do hope you see why we should all be mobilizing the Company to be better. We have four weeks tomorrow till expiration and your Union needs everyone on board to step up!
Information on our Union conducting a strike authorization vote went out to your Locals this afternoon. Stay tuned from your Local on how you can vote. While we have every intention of trying to reach an agreement by expiration that addresses our members' issues, we must be prepared if the Company fails to address our members’ best interests.
Our next scheduled meeting with the Company is Monday and we will follow up with a new bargaining report afterwards.
To stay updated on actions and mobilizations, text FIGHT to 49484. You can also fill out this quick form to get involved and receive the latest bargaining updates.
In Solidarity,
CWA/AT&T SW Bargaining Team
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