Here’s the latest report from the Communications Workers Of America website regarding their union negotiations with AT&T:

Today the subcommittees met in an attempt to resolve some of our differences around Article 2 and Work Rules/Appendices.

In today’s formal session the Company rejected the Union proposal for time off. Our proposal included language that a minimum of 25% of a work group could be off at any given time.

The Company passed two more retrogressive proposals. The first would increase the number of unpaid days before receiving any sickness absence pay for employees with less than 8 years of service. The second one was in reference to Sunday premium pay. The company proposed to only pay time and one tenth per hour on Sunday instead of time and one half.

With only 10 days left before contract expiration, we have had 21 formal bargaining sessions, many subcommittee meetings, made 31 proposals to improve the contract, received 31 regressive proposals from the company and have reached 0 tentative agreements!

Gee, can you say strike? AT&T has been preparing for this eventuality for months. They’ve been busy training their non-union employees to take over when the union walks out. This does much to explain why the level of service at AT&T has slipped even further from their sub-par standards.

Teledynamic has been spreading the word to our customers to brace for the worst. Especially hard hit are new orders for lines or services. As one can imagine, the first priority in a work crisis is to try to maintain some level of customer service. New orders do not receive a high priority.

So, will this CWA strike be protracted or might the negotiators miraculously reach a breakthrough in the fleeting days remaining before the deadline? It is no secret that AT&T is spending massive resources on building their wireless business. Equally transparent is their de-emphasis on wireline business and cost cutting in this area. The majority of CWA workers at AT&T work on the wireline (analog and digital circuits) side of their business. It is my prognostication that AT&T is going to play hardball to drive down costs. And the union doesn’t have the economy on their side. I’m sure that the popular sentiment of the workers is that they are just glad to have a job, even if in the future it will pay a little less and include fewer benefits.

Let me know your thoughts.

Randy Kremlacek

Randy is the President of Teledynamic Communications. The company specializes in premise-based and hosted SIP PBX’s, pbx monitoring and Unified Communications.

Yesterday a business associate and I were lamenting the state of customer service in our industry.  The discussion got around to AT&T and their perpetual poor service, now compounded by their recent layoffs.    We agreed that many of our customers don’t mind getting poor service from “the phone company”.   However, they have a much higher expectation when it comes to Teledynamic and other telecom providers.

Instead of whining about the unfairness of it all, maybe we should use this double standard to motivate us to improve our own service.   So Mr. Customer, you’ll punish me for service levels that would be fine if it was AT&T?  Fine, I accept the challenge and we’ll strive to provide an even-higher level of service.

Customer service in the time of recession is doubly challenging.    Revenues and profits are dropping but the cost of providing good service stays the same.   Some organizations will cut service levels to save money, hoping that customers will understand and remain loyal. Other companies such as ours just bite the financial bullet, keep service levels high and hope that the investment pays off in the long term.   Frankly, I don’t know which strategy is more financially sound.   And certainly both cause management to lose sleep.  

After our economy turns around, check back with me and I’ll let you know whether I made a sound investment!

Randy Kremlacek

Teledynamic Communications provides free educational materials about telecommunications on an ongoing basis to our subscribers and customers. We are a provider of a complete range of VOIP, telecom and data solutions for business.