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VERIZON AND IBEW BEGIN CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS

Formal negotiations between Verizon and the IBEW began Mon. in New England and will move to other company territories in the next couple of weeks as both sides look to agree on new contract terms before the current one expires Aug. 2. Negotiations will begin with the CWA next week, with that contract also ending Aug. 2, officials said in a press conference call, but serious discussions between groups probably won’t get under way until after July 4.

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The 2 unions cover 75,000 Verizon employees in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, with 27 separate contracts to be negotiated. CWA declined to comment on specific issues, but said it would release a statement in the next few days.

The effects of Verizon’s becoming smaller as a company were the main issues its officials said needed attention, citing wage and benefit adjustment, employment security, flexible forced deployment and absenteeism. Verizon said it had had to make early retirement plans more favorable to employees as well as begin layoffs because of its reduced size, due mostly to the change in economic climate and the burgeoning of new competitive companies in the telecom industry. Many of the company’s concerns are similar to those in previous years, many of which were won by the unions, so the employees look at the negotiations primarily as defending what they already have. Both sides expressed confidence that an agreement could be reached before the contracts expired.

“We are in a much different situation than we were in 2000 and in the late 1990s,” Verizon Vp-Media Relations Eric Rabe told reporters. He said such differences included (1) customers’ being more demanding than ever for the most efficient processes, (2) competition in the telecom market being “hotter than its ever been,” and (3) new media replacing telephones as the main mode of communication. “Customer have options and will go elsewhere. If that happens, union jobs will go away,” Rabe said. He said that the company’s losses of retail access lines were in the double digits and that 40% of the time people once spent on the phone now was spent on something else, such as e-mail or instant messaging. In what Rabe called an “interesting regulatory environment, the “growth we saw in the late 1990s just is not happening today, so we don’t need as many employees as we used to.”

Rabe said employee security would be a big issue this year, as layoffs had become more frequent. He said Verizon had lost 12,000 employees to retirement since 2001, paid $500 million last year in early retirement funding and laid off 3,400 more in 2002. While he said the company “wants to negotiate a contract so workers don’t have to worry about their jobs,” IBEW Local 2222 spokesman Paul Feeney suggested Verizon wasn’t doing enough: “It’s definitely an issue with technological advances, and we understand that, but we ask that they keep us updated, trained and allow us into this industry.” Rabe said the company had too many employees, and Feeney said his unit was “starting to fall a bit and we're taking the heat for it. They laid off in December of last year for the first time in 10 years, and now the company has a process where they declare a certain employee a ’surplus,'which is disheartening in its own right.”

Flexible forced deployment of employees to different work locations was noted by both sides as an important issue, with Rabe calling the current contract “anticompetitive and out of date.” Feeney said unions worked out a certain level of job security in the last contract negotiations 3 years ago that prevented some of the forced deployment that could damage some of the stronger units, such as Local 2222: “In the merger, they created jobs they thought they could move across the country. We bargained for a fair wage, but now they want to move jobs where they can get the work done for a lot cheaper. But the unions are strong here. We've got the best technicians around, so we don’t want to move them to proven states and unproven technicians.” Feeney also said the possibility that Verizon could move jobs out of the country was a concern of union members, saying “they took this fight to us 3 years ago and we won it, and now they want to take it away from us again.”

Absenteeism of union workers wasn’t an issue brought up by Verizon in the past, but Rabe stressed that issue. He said on average 6% of Verizon employees were absent each day, twice the industry average. Rabe said that cost $600 million per year in lost days and replacement pay, and solving that problem was “fundamental to providing good customer service.”

Wage changes and health care benefits will be discussed together as success in one area affects negotiation in the other, officials said. Rabe said Verizon technicians were the highest paid in the telecom industry, with $60,000 as the average annual salary in New York state. On health care, Rabe said workers on average paid “something like 5% of the cost of medical care, while the national average is around 26%.” He called Verizon’s goal in that area a “just economic package,” which he said employes already had, “and that will still be true when the new contract is signed.” Feeney cited the health care accords unions made with the company (then Bell Atlantic) in 1989 negotiations: “In 1989, we struck for 17 weeks on this issue, and we're telling them it’s a battle we'll win again. If we need to strike for 17 weeks, we will.”

Feeney said: “We went to the streets years ago and we saw then that there was a pattern that we have to go to the streets to win any of these battles.” Rabe said that workers’ rallies were just a part of the process, and that when parties “get down to the serious process of it, it is a fairly optimistic situation.” Feeney agreed: “These things tend to shake out like they always do. We're confident that we'll get fair contract, and if we mobilize our members, we can hammer this out before August 2.”