With less than three days left to hammer out a contract and avoid a strike, negotiations between AT&T and its union wireline employees don’t appear close to resolution, according to news reports, and about 110,000 employees are preparing to strike when their contract expires at midnight this Saturday.
With health care costs a particular sticking point, one union official told the press this week that negotiations were “not going well at all.”
In a research note published this morning, Morgan Keegan analyst Simon Leopold wrote, “We won’t go as far as predicting a strike [but] we have concluded that the risk feels higher than usual. Our checks indicate that AT&T’s non-union employees have received strike-duty assignments, as is typical in such situations, and training that sounds more extensive than in the past.”
However, both parties have indicated to the media that extending the current contract to let negotiations continue was still a possibility.
In response to this news…you find it hard to feel sympathy when you consider the big picture. What a great job you AT&T folks have! And if you have any health care at all, you are lucky…..think about how many million Americans have no insurance at all (not to mention those that have no job at all).
I just get discouraged with a nation that is broke already and we just keep beating ourselves up out of our purest trait, greed. Greed is what got our country to this place in the first place so let’s just get greedier!
Be thankful for where you exist and the opportunity you have with AT&T and just go to work, whiners!
I would give anything to work for AT&T. My father retired from GTE and I have been a telecom professional for over 20 years. But couldn’t get AT&T to even look at me! Huh! Screw your little strike issues anyway.
Thanks
So you think just because of the economy, that we should bend over and take the crud they are trying to shovel at us? What do you know about any of this from an insider’s perspective?
Do you know the garages have 50% less techs on staff? That’s 50% cut in pay and benefits AT&T is saving. Not to mention the Team Awards being yanked! What about CEO, Stephenson, who makes MILLIONS and wants MORE at the lowley workers expense?
Will he ask for a bailout and make it the American Tax payer’s expense, as the CEOs of the auto industry and investment houses have done?
It’s your kind of thinking that is dragging America down! We will be in the history books as a memory of free capitalism because of spineless whiners like you that refuse to stand up and say NO! Enough is enough!
AT&T is raking in the bucks and they need to realize what it took to get them there! This is about greedy CEOs taking BACK what was already promised.
We work hard through heat, rain, snow…whatever, to be sure the phone lines that bring you your computer, TV, phones are working. Even with people getting rid of landbased phones, the main lines still need to be there to feed everything else! Verizon and the others rent our lines. They aren’t going to maintain them! Why should we work for less, when our taxes, utilities, rent, credit card rates, etc… have all gone up? When the income of AT&T has gone up? The GREED is on CEO Stephenson’s side, not ours.
So I do not accept the lame arguement that due to the economy, we should be happy and shut up. It is a cop out.