SBC Workers Say 4-Day Strike Is a Wake-Up Call

Telephone service is not like grocery shopping. Customers don’t dash out at all hours to pick up headsets, cables or phone jacks. They get a bill once a month, they pay it and they forget about it.

So when nearly 100,000 union members launched a four-day strike against SBC Communications Inc. on Friday over wages, medical benefits and job security, few Californians found themselves directly affected.

Except for directory assistance, which was slow to respond early in the day, all systems appeared to perform reliably throughout SBC’s 13-state territory, the company said. If not for pickets at SBC facilities, the strike could well be invisible.

“We went to the grocery store during the [Southern California] supermarket strike, and they asked us not to cross the picket lines,” said striker Richard Hilliard, 32, of Anaheim Hills. “I asked them if they were going to stop using the phone if we go out on strike.”

The idea of striking for only four days -- and at that, over the weekend when many members don’t work anyway -- is a calculated risk for the Communications Workers of America, which represents about 60% of SBC’s 170,000 workers. In California, nearly 30,000 of SBC’s 47,000 workers are CWA members.

“The purpose of a four-day strike was to send a message, a wake-up call, to the company that these are very important issues,” said CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson. “But without going into a prolonged strike that would have a long-term impact on the company and our members.”

The walkout is the first strike against SBC since it became an independent company in 1984. Union members have been working without a contract since early April.

Whether the CWA’s strategy works won’t be known immediately, but later Friday, both sides returned to negotiating tables in each of SBC’s four regions. Though no formal talks are scheduled on the national level, corporate leaders are holding informal discussions with CWA’s leadership, both sides said.

“This [negotiation] process was different,” said SBC spokesman Walt Sharp. “We mutually agreed to federal mediation at the national level to cut through and streamline things and be more efficient. It had been done at the regional level in the past, obviously with a lot of coordination on both sides.”

UC Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein said the function of a four-day strike was “to mobilize members and see what the strength is. Going out on the picket line can really build consciousness -- if you keep it short.”

He and other labor experts said a short strike could be just the jolt needed to restart stalled negotiations.

The telecom industry is so automated that it takes a long time for a strike to have any serious effect on operations, Lichtenstein said. Strikes are either short or very long -- nothing in between, he said.

Timothy F. Ryan, a labor law partner at Morrison & Foerster in Los Angeles, said a short strike can backfire, playing into the hands of management.

“The silver lining in this for the employer is that it gets a four-day tryout to see how its replacements work out,” said Ryan, who represented Ralphs in the grocery strike that ended this year. “In past strikes, it takes a week or two to get replacements up to speed.”

SBC hired replacements and brought in nonunion retirees to help keep operations going.

Richard Banks, director of collective bargaining at the AFL-CIO, said the union’s plan was “absolutely rational.” Besides showing its force -- nearly all union members walked out -- the CWA is “holding out the possibility of a much deeper, wider, longer confrontation if the company does not see the light.”

The CWA is regarded as one of the more strategic and creative unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella.

As in negotiations this year with Verizon Communications Inc., the AFL-CIO is mounting a pledge drive to get SBC customers to agree to switch phone service to AT&T; Corp., the only unionized alternative in 11 SBC states, should a regular strike occur. The pledge also would have the customers returning to SBC after the strike.

Union members picketing in Orange and Tustin were well aware of the thin line they walk between hurting the company enough to get a contract and making sure that customers don’t become so upset that they leave for good.

“We want to show that we’re dissatisfied with their offer, but we’re not trying to hurt them with this strike,” said Kenny Williams, 52, of Corona.

The union wants no changes in medical benefits and hometown job guarantees that would get union members into the company’s growing lines of business, such as DSL, and stem its outsourcing, mainly overseas, of work that union members do.

SBC, pressed by falling prices and falling demand for lines, wants to cut costs. It says that medical expenses are its single fastest-rising cost and that labor costs will hurt its ability to compete against lower-wage cable companies as they start to offer telephone service. SBC shares rose 2 cents Friday to $24.33 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company’s offer would continue to pay for union members’ healthcare premiums but would raise co-payments to 10% of total medical expenses from the current range of 4% to 7%.

For Laura Harrell, 46, of Azusa, that could mean a lot. The SBC operator, picketing outside a facility in Orange, is a mother of two girls. One has cerebral palsy, the other asthma.

“Obviously,” she said, “I need a good medical plan.”