Chicago, IL
Bell Atlantic's plan to purchase NYNEX and create a telecommunications giant dominating the Boston-to-Washington urban corridor threatens the best interest of the workers, communities and telephone customers involved, as well as the health of the industry overall. While the acquisition was made possible by the recent Telecommunications Act, the plan subverts the Act's real intent, and it should be blocked.
This proposed concentration of corporate power and media control has raised enormous concern by a growing coalition of public interest groups -- concern that is well founded. Both companies have allowed service standards to deteriorate, while steadily downsizing their workforces and funneling these savings into sideline business ventures instead of maintaining or improving their telecom systems. NYNEX has been paying millions of dollars in fines for service delays and outages while the citizens of New York pay the highest phone rates in the country. Bell Atlantic has recorded a near 500 percent increase in customer repeat trouble complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, meanwhile raking in record profits -- second-highest among the Bell companies -- and continuing to press for rate increases.
While state public utility commissioners have looked toward future competitive voices to pressure these companies into providing high quality service at reasonable rates, the proposed Bell Atlantic-NYNEX alliance would eliminate the greatest potential source of competition -- competition from each other, a factor envisioned in the 1996 Act. The new company overnight would become the nation's second largest telecommunications company, behind only AT&T, with a combined territory that accounts for about 30 percent of the long-distance telephone traffic in the United States.
The corporate culture of these companies should be closely examined in judging whether the more powerful "new Bell Atlantic" could be expected to behave in a responsible manner. And here, the track record of the senior partner in this deal, Bell Atlantic, is cause for special alarm. It is a record of the worst labor relations in the industry, and of the systematic erosion of jobs and job standards.
In fact, there has already been a preview of the proposed partnership, as the 90,000 NYNEX and Bell Atlantic workers represented by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers can attest.
When the two companies merged their cellular phone operations last year, the predatory corporate philosophy of Bell Atlantic prevailed over the formerly more enlightened labor relations policy of NYNEX, and the new Bell Atlantic/NYNEX Mobile venture soon joined the AFL-CIO's "Don't Buy" list. The mobile company trashed NYNEX's collective bargaining agreements with both unions, justifying this breach of contract, and faith with its workers, by claiming that it was a new enterprise which didn't have to honor previous commitments.
Notwithstanding the fact that this action was illegal and likely will be overturned by the National Labor Relations Board, complaints to that effect have been issued by the NLRB, Bell Atlantic revealed its core corporate values by issuing a boilerplate union-busters "Supervisors Guide" for the mobile company advising how to "inform employees of the disadvantages of belonging to a union" and urging supervisors to "inform employees of known negatives about the union and union officials trying to organize them, such as criminal activities (racketeering, kickbacks, bribery, etc.)."
This activity fits the pattern of Bell Atlantic's strategy the last few years of creating new non-union subsidiaries for the jobs of the future, denying transfer rights to these jobs for union workers facing layoff, spying on, intimidating and firing people who try to organize, and attempting whenever possible to subcontract work and jobs away from the union bargaining units.
Bell Atlantic's arrogance an anti-union animus were further spotlighted last year when its management boasted that it would "break the pattern" of union contracts bargained throughout the rest of the industry and impose givebacks on the workers. Bell Atlantic only fell in line with the industry after an extraordinary 6-month corporate campaign and multi-million-dollar advertising/media effort by CWA.
There is no indication that the new merged company would seek to build more positive and cooperative labor relations. CWA and IBEW leaders have discussed the proposed alliance with company management, but the companies, particularly the senior partner, Bell Atlantic, refuse to give commitments to job protections or to reverse their anti-union posture at the joint cellular company. From this, the public can only be left to predict labor discord rather than labor stability, but on an even larger scale, at the "new Bell Atlantic."
Proponents of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 declared their intent to open up competition in the telecommunications market, foster new and better services at reasonable rates, and also create thousands of good new jobs in a dynamic industry.
It is clear that Bell Atlantic's buyout of NYNEX would take us in the opposite direction: a bigger telecom monopoly with even less incentive to reverse the companies, existing pattern of declining service standards, ever higher rates, and the destruction of good jobs.
The AFL-CIO pledges full support to the CWA and IBEW in seeking to block the Bell Atlantic-NYNEX alliance, and calls upon all federal and state agencies charged with reviewing the proposed deal to withhold approval.
The AFL-CIO reaffirms its boycott of NYNEX-Bell Atlantic Mobile and urges members of all affiliates to utilize the alternative carrier for cellular telephone service.