Employees at the AT&T office in Pineville have joined the Communication Workers of America (CWA) on strike against the phone company.
AT&T technicians, customer service representatives, and others who install, maintain, and support AT&T’s residential and business wireline telecommunications network in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee walked off the job at 3 p.m. on Friday, August 16.
According to a press release located on the CWA website at https://cwa-union.org, 17,000 communications workers are on strike, citing unfair labor practices due to AT&T’s failure to bargain in good faith.
The contract between CWA and AT&T Southeast expired on August 3. Negotiators have been at work bargaining on a new contract since late June.
CWA and AT&T have entered into federal mediation and had their first meeting with the mediator on Wednesday.. “We are hopeful that mediation might lead us to the agreement our members deserve,” the CWA bargaining team wrote  in a statement sent to striking CWA members.
Frank McMillian, president of CWA Local 3372, said the union went on strike because they felt the bargaining process was not being done fairly and properly.
“The normal way to do that is to sit down and work things out. Everybody’s not going to agree with everything, but it’s done fairly, and you work it out. It’s not being done that way,” he said.
McMillian explained that CWA’s role is to get the best wages and benefits they can for the employees.
“What we do is we go in, we try to get better wages, better healthcare, and better benefits,” he said. “We represent the employees.”
AT&T also released a statement on the situation which can be found at https://about.att.com/pages/bargaining.
The company says CWA’s claims of unfair labor practices are not grounded in fact.
“We have been engaged in substantive bargaining since day one and are eager to reach an agreement that benefits our hard-working employees. As evidence, we have reached 3 agreements this year covering more than 13,000 employees, including our most recent tentative agreement with District 9. We remain committed to working with District 3 in the same manner,” their statement reads. “We’re disappointed that union leaders would call for a strike at this point in the negotiations, rather than directing their energies toward constructive discussions at the bargaining table. This action needlessly jeopardizes the wages and well-being of our employees. We have various business continuity measures in place to avoid disruptions to operations and will continue to provide our customers with the great service they expect.”
There have been reports of service outages and delays getting repair made at various locations across the Southeast. Fortunately there have been no disruptions to service in Bell County.
The workers striking in Pineville said they were eager to get back to work and back to serving AT&T’s customers.
McMillian added that the CWA members do not intend to cause customers any issues.
“We care about the customers. We’re not trying to make anything hard on the customer. We really didn’t want to go out on strike, but there’s no other choice. We want to be treated fairly and equally,” he said. “Everybody wants to go back to work, they have families, they have kids to take care of, some have senior parents to take care of. There’s just a lot involved in this…we’re just hoping things work out.”