Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995                   TAG: 9509010025
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: F-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

IN CASE YOU THOUGHT STRIKING WAS A THING OF THE PAST . . .

The workers aren't on strike - at least not yet. What they're doing is called informational picketing for the union whose labor contract with the regional telephone company expired Aug. 5. The picketing is part of a public relations and "internal" campaign to pressure Bell Atlantic Corp. into a settlement.

Bringing public and internal pressure, including stockholder concern, to bear on management is not a new tactic for labor unions. A good example of that kind of strategy, pursued to its fullest, was the United Mine Workers' fight with the Pittston Coal Group in Southwest Virginia from 1988 to 1990.

Such a strategy can be effective, particularly when the company hands the union a hot issue to hammer the way Pittston did by cutting off retiree health benefits. Bell Atlantic may have done the same by making retiree health care one of its major unresolved issues in its dispute with the CWA.

The union has reached agreements with six other former regional Bell system companies. Bell Atlantic has refused to go along with the pattern set in those contracts, saying the company will face competition in its local telephone market from cable television operators and others sooner than the other regional companies.

Bell Atlantic provides telephone service to 12 million customers in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The company has 37,000 people working under the CWA contract. In Virginia, the contract covers 6,650 workers, although not all are union members.

The company made its latest offer to the CWA on Aug. 15 but said it has yet to receive a formal response. The key issues in the union-company talks as the contract expired were wages, job security and health care benefits for both retirees and active workers.

Besides retiree health care, the two sides are still far apart on the issue of job security, said Larry Akers, president of CWA Local 2204. That local represents 875 Bell Atlantic workers between Roanoke and Cumberland Gap.

Providing union workers with job security is important because of company downsizing, Akers said. As for union retirees, they've never had to pay a portion of their health care bills, and the union is not about to let them start now, he said.

"I gave 42 years to Bell Atlantic. Now they want to cut my health care." That was the headline on an advertisement the CWA ran recently in The Washington Post. The ad carried a picture of Charles Lee, a retired Bell Atlantic worker, and his wife, along with a statement from Lee about the burden the company's health care proposal would put on the couple.

The union is prepared to wage a $5 million advertising and internal campaign against the company that will begin in full force after Labor Day, Akers said.

Besides advertising and informational picketing, other tactics being used by the union are aimed at the company's profits, which were $1.4 billion last year on revenues of $13.8 billion before an accounting maneuver that resulted in the company's posting a $755 million loss. The union will attempt to persuade large institutional investors, such as union pension funds, to stay away from Bell Atlantic stock during the dispute. The price of the company's stock is virtually unchanged since the contract expired, trading for about $59 a share.

Additionally, the union has threatened to mail in postcards it has collected from sympathetic telephone customers that instruct the company to cut off profitable phone services such as call waiting and call forwarding.

Then, there are the little things. Last Wednesday, for example, was "rotten apple day," when union members in Southwest Virginia planned to bring rotten apples to work to give to their supervisors as a symbol of their unhappiness with management.

The company has responded to the union's efforts by refusing to deduct union dues from workers' paychecks and cutting off workers' rights to arbitration, Akers said, and three workers at Bell Atlantic's offices on Airport Road were suspended recently for refusing to work mandatory overtime.

During the Pittston strike, Murray Finley, a former textile union president who then was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, observed that a public relations campaign has to be based on fact if it is going to be successful. ``It's not as simple as saying `Here's the poor workers, and there's the brutal company,''' he said. "It's got to have a good set of facts on its side."

The late Clark Mollenhoff, a former labor reporter and journalism professor at Washington and Lee University, observed that Pittston had made a colossal public relations blunder by cutting off retiree health benefits at the beginning of the dispute. After that, no matter how well-grounded the company's arguments were in law and economics, they would not sway the public, he said.

Pittston also used advertisements, hiring public relations firms in Richmond and New York. Company management said it did not think its story was being told.

Harry Mitchell, a spokesman for Bell Atlantic in Charleston, W.Va., said the company hasn't placed any advertisements related to the bargaining. Bell Atlantic prefers to do its bargaining at the negotiating table, he said.

UMW members worked for 14 months after their contract with Pittston expired before embarking on a nine-month strike against the company. The union turned to advertising and large-scale sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience to draw nationwide attention to the strike.

The strategy worked, rallying some clergy and other unions to the UMW's side, and eventually bringing then-Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole to the coalfields. Dole appointed former Labor Secretary William Usery as a special mediator, and he eventually brought the dispute to an end on terms not unfavorable to the UMW.

"I hope this doesn't turn into a Pittston," the CWA's Akers said about his union's dispute with Bell Atlantic. But, he added with caution, "I certainly don't like the tone I see in these negotiations."