sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General Telecom News Fairpoint CEO Responds To Pingree Over Striking Workers

The best way to make a bad situation worse is to have a politician add their 2 cents worth of distorted facts and misconceptions.

Any one who has been a member of a union has probably had to endure a strike or two. It's no fun for the union workers. Many smaller unions have no strike funds for members, so the striking members are without pay or benefits while on strike. Even the unions that do have strike funds can only sustain a week or two and then their fund depletes.

Even after returning to work, those who were on strike won't recover from the financial hit for years.

Rcaman

I was with NY Telephone for a 7 1/2 month strike. No fun at all. Crawled back and never made up the lost money. Union leaders lose nothing, they still draw salaries.
In this case if the company goes to subs, the employees will be out of jobs.

Fairpoint was, originally, an ILEC in Maine. I don't remember if they were known as Pinetree Telephone back then. Does all of this also affect Classic Fairpoint or is it just the former Verizon territories

I think it's just the chunk they bought from Verizon but not sure. I'm watching because our contract is up in August and the union reps are already warning us to start saving. This is my first union job so I'll be curious what happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_New_England_Telephone_Operations

My understanding is that the ILEC portion of Fairpoint is not unionized, though I could be mistaken. Also my understanding is that if this strike drags on for a year, that Fairpoint can then hire permanent replacements. Is that true?

This is happening a lot in Maine since the paper industry broke the union contracts several others have or tried. I'm not sure who Fairpoint was when first in Maine but it wasn't Pine Tree. Fairpoint first bought a small LEC in Mid Maine area then branched out buying up all the small LEC's then Verizon. Pine Tree was purchased by Mid Maine Communications who was the LEC in northern Maine. They then became OTT and purchased by Otelco now a couple weeks ago I heard they have a new owner. Between Maine's 3 biggest LEC's and TW Fairpoint is the only one unionized.

I believe that a Company could permently hire replacement workers after a 6 months strike as long as the union walked out. (Not locked out)
The Bush administration decreased that to 4 months. The Obama administration extended that with FCC approval.

At least that's my understanding of it.

I was on a vendor meet today with an actual FP tech ("management" guy who normally does engineering work). It was interesting to hear his take on the strike (he mostly sides with the company). Also interesting to hear that he wants to switch back to field tech work after the strike is over, as field techs make a lot more money than doing engineering. Also heard some interesting stories about their record system and how bad it is (records entirely wrong and database allows for mistakes to be entered i.e. no verification on simple fields).