As I write this, there has been a strike by 17,000 union member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) against AT&T that started on August 16. Like most strikes that last for more than a week, there is some rhetoric flying from both parties accusing the other side of negotiating in bad faith.
Telcom strikes have been part of the history of the industry. One of the first big telecom strikes was in 1947 with the union at that time being the National Federation of Telephone Workers. AT&T was determined at the time to bust the union, and instead of negotiating nationally, reached agreements with regional subsets of workers, which quickly broke the union.
The CWA was born out of the aftermath of the 1947 strike. CWA workers went on strike over the years with regional strikes against carriers like Southern Bell and General Telephone Company. CWA had a nationwide strike against the Ma Bell AT&T in 1968, 1971, and 1983. After divestiture there were strikes against AT&T in 1986 and Verizon in 2000 and 2011.
The nationwide strikes have generally been resolved fairly quickly. The 1968 strike lasted eighteen days, the 1971 strike for seven days, and the 1983 strike for twenty-two days. Other strikes lasted a lot longer, such as a strike against General Telephone in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky that lasted for five months. As I am writing this, the current strike against AT&T has already lasted for twenty-two days.
I decided to write about this because I was part of the 1983 strike against AT&T. I was in management at Southwestern Bell and was informed at midnight on a Saturday night to report immediately to be an operator.
Being on the management side of a strike makes you quickly appreciate what the union employees do for a living. A handful of other management people and I walked into an operator center in St. Louis that probably had sixty operator positions. The boards were flashing with waiting calls and we got a crash hands-on course in being an operator from an operator center manager. It was largely a disaster for the first day or two since the quick training could not teach us all of the nuances of being an operator and operating a switchboard.
I ran into a situation that really shook me. I got a call from a woman in a phone booth whose husband was having a heart attack and needed an ambulance. Unfortunately, that phone booth was located at an intersection where St. Louis and two suburbs all came together. I had no idea that each of these towns had a different 911 system, and I guessed wrong and had to try all three towns to find a dispatcher who would send an ambulance. That was ten minutes of panic on my part – and I never found out what happened to the heart attack victim. A few years after the strike, the region started working on a unified 911 system that eliminated this kind of jurisdictional nightmare. The union operators would have known this kind of nuanced information, but I had no clue.
A lot of my colleagues were assigned to fix outdoor problems. The 1983 strike started on August 7, and in St. Louis, that means thunderstorm season. I recall storms hitting almost immediately after the strike started and then regularly through the strike. My friends working outdoors said they fell behind immediately and the backlog of open issues increased every day. They got better at making repairs, but they never came close to catching up. This strike happened long before broadband, and my experience is that broadband customers today are far more demanding than voice customers were in 1983. I can’t imagine what would have happened if there had been a major hail storm or something that knocked out a lot of the area all at once.
I grew up in a union household, and I saw first-hand how being in a strong union benefited workers and their families with good wages and a solid retirement plan. Getting a firsthand look at the day-to-day work of running a giant telco during a strike gave me an increased appreciation of the great work the union folks at the company did every day.