dessalles

Unbeknownst to the throngs of iPhone owners bitching and moaning on their tech blogs and micro-messages over AT&T’s poor wireless service, the telecom giant has a much bigger problem, the most French of business problems, one which has led thousands of suburban middle managers to buy their first steel-toed work boots: impending union strike.¹

On August 7, 1983 the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) began a 22-day strike against AT&T. The strike marked the last time the two unions, which at the time represented 700,000 AT&T employees, were able to collectively bargain for all it’s workers. Months later on January 1, 1984, the decade-old anti-trust suit, United States v. AT&T, culminated in the divestment of the national monopoly into seven regional “Baby Bells”, fragmenting with it the unionized workforce.

26 years and 3 mergers later (the most recent in 2005), AT&T now constitutes four of the original seven holding companies. Through this slow process of re-monopilization, AT&Ts national footprint has grown considerably, and with it the CWA and IBEW’s bargaining leverage over AT&T. Albeit divesture, downsizing, job-reclassification and 20 years of automation have left the unions representing a mere 125,000-or-so AT&T employees, they still account for over a third of AT&T’s 294,000 total workforce. Ma Bell is still the most heavily unionized company in the United States.

The bulk of AT&T’s current CWA and IBEW contracts expired this April, and four months after the deadline, negotiations are ongoing. Wage cuts, health care and job security remain points of contention at the bargaining table; but the table dynamics are about to change as the last of the union contracts is set to end on August 8th. If a settlement isn’t reached by that date, every unionized AT&T employee will be working without contract and free to strike (with the exception of the 18,500-strong Midwest union, which reached an agreement last week).

The professional makeup of today’s unions are not what they were during the 1983 strike. Switchboard operators have all but been replaced by automated systems. The rise of computing and the Internet over the last 20 years has obsolesced typists, secretaries, clerks and other administrative information workers. Today, the CWA and IBEW predominantly represent (as far as I can gather) customer services, network administrators and field technicians. Ironically, the very same communications technology they helped build now enables customer service and network administration to take place remotely, anywhere in the world. And in a sad twist of fate, the unions’ strike threats have done little but mobilize AT&Ts strike contingency plans, in turn hastening the outsourcing of union jobs–the same outsourcing that’s a key topic of contract negotiations.

But there’s another twist in this story of labor love lost…

There are jobs AT&T can’t outsource, jobs which labor laws prevent AT&T from filling with armies of foreign temp workers: on-site field technicians responsible for the physical maintenance and expansion of AT&T’s infrastructure. When it comes to laying cable underground, climbing telephone poles, descending into manholes and pulling tree branches off wires, it’s an All-American affair. And as it turns out, AT&T policy dictates that “managers” (the non-unionized half of the workforce) take over all vital union jobs during a strike. That’s right. If the unions strike, India effectively takes over all operational knowledge-work, and the white-collar desk jockeys have to strap on tool belts and get dirty.

Contingency Plan 2009 (aka “CP09″)…

In what amounts to the cutest large-scale retraining of a workforce in modern history, for the last 6 months AT&T has been sending any middle (-aged) manager without a doctor’s notice to training facilities throughout the United States to learn the ins-and-outs of telecommunications field work. Throw in hundreds of hours of web-based video training and AT&T hopes its managers, who in theory know how it all works, can keep services running uninterrupted if the CWA and IBEW choose to strike.

The byproduct of AT&T’s so-called Contingency Plan 2009 is hundreds of photos of people who don’t look like they should be climbing telephone poles, in fact, climbing telephone poles. Both bemused and amused, many of these select AT&T managers have uploaded photos of their training experiences to flickr to share with their coworkers the novelty of suspending oneself from a telephone pole, hands-free, on a weekday. (In all fairness, I’ve never climbed a telephone pole, so I’ve got to hand it to those who didn’t bail on the training.) Now not everyone is being trained in the art of lumber ascension; some must learn to navigate the underground, and others will spend their days on rungs (Ladder Day!).

Sightly more seriously… I quite like the idea of designers, planners and architects having to confront the physical reality of their work. One wonders how Frank Gehry’s design sensibilities would change if he had to help construct one of his notoriously difficult-to-build undulating designs. Would ad planners rethink their media buys if they actually had to plaster up all the posters and billboards themselves? Maybe GM should require it’s automotive designers to spend one day a week on the factory line–might they start designing simpler, cheaper cars?

Or, here’s one… maybe all those angry iPhone owners should relax and enjoy the tele-computing miracle they get to carry around in their pockets everyday.

¹Fortunately, eHow has a 7-step tutorial on How to Deal with Union Problems that doesn’t call for the discharge of firearms. Unfortunately, the tutorial’s difficulty has been graded “Moderately Challenging” (wait, what?!)