Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 31, 1992 TAG: 9203310182
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
AT&T Board Chairman Robert E. Allen said management's main concern was flexibility to organize its work force to stay competitive with non-unionized telecommunications companies.
Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America, which represents the bulk of AT&T's work force, said 133,000 union jobs have been eliminated since a court agreement broke up AT&T eight years ago.
"Our goal in these negotiations is to end the layoffs and downsizing and re-establish employment security and job growth at AT&T," he said.
Bahr said wage talks would be based on the recent contract CWA won with NYNEX, the regional telephone company in New York. It included a 13 percent base-wage increase over three years, cost-of-living protections, pension increases and health care gains.
The three-year contract with AT&T expires May 30.
Allen said 85 percent of the work force remains unionized.
Transfer and training programs are in effect for workers whose positions are cut so they can stay with the corporation, management officials say. Union officials have complained that the company's job-notification system does not include non-union jobs at AT&T subsidiaries.
Since losing its monopoly hold on the telephone industry, AT&T has focused on long-distance service, manufacturing and computer systems. It's still a dominant force in the business, with $63 billion in revenues last year and operations around the world.
AT&T employs 147,564 non-management people in the United States, about 97,206 of them represented by the CWA and 24,402 more by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
by CNB