FairPoint Communications and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have 11 months to hash out their next contract, but the parties remain at odds and in court.
The disagreement dates back to late 2010, when FairPoint hired a non-union firm in New York. The electrical union cried foul, saying the collective bargaining agreement — which the parties had negotiated when FairPoint took over Verizon’s northern New England landlines in 2008 — prohibited such a contract.
An arbitration panel agreed in March 2012. So did a Maine district court judge in February 2013, after considering FairPoint’s appeal of the arbitration decision. The North Carolina-based telecommunications company has now filed a second appeal.
The point of dispute is FairPoint’s hiring of a non-union Canadian firm in 2009 and subsequent transferral of that contract to a non-union New York firm the following year. Similar work already was underway at the company’s Portland, Maine, location. But FairPoint chose not to direct the work the union’s way.
Temporary non-union contracting would have been permissible, the arbitration panel determined, but FairPoint’s decisions amounted to a permanent transfer of union jobs to non-union workers.
“The results of the arbitration are final,” said Mike Spillane, business manager of IBEW Local 2326 in Vermont. The union and its counterparts in Maine and New Hampshire collectively represent about 1,700 FairPoint employees, all of whom work under the same collective bargaining agreement at the heart of the appeal. “They lose a case in arbitration, but they still refuse to abide by the arbitration ruling,” Spillane said. “Then they got the absolute set of you know what to say, ‘We’re going to take this to court.'”
FairPoint officials declined to comment on the case, citing company protocols to not discuss pending litigation. FairPoint’s rationale for appeal, as represented in court documents, is multi-faceted and entails, in large part, semantics.
The arbitration panel mistakenly conflated “jobs” with “work” in interpreting the collective bargaining agreement, FairPoint claimed, according to U.S. District Court Judge George Z. Singal. “Specifically, FairPoint states that ‘jobs’ and ‘work’ are analytically distinct and yet the Arbitration Panel substituted ‘work’ for ‘jobs’ in the Transfer of Jobs provision,” Singal’s discussion reads. “Here again FairPoint is merely urging a different interpretation of the contract language to the facts of this case,” he wrote.
The company also argued the jobs (or work, as the case may be) that went to the non-union firms were not “transferred” from the union because they were new positions created after the collective bargaining agreement had been reached. “This straightforward argument has a great deal of surface appeal,” the arbitration panel wrote in 2012, “but we are convinced that it does not account for what actually happened here.”
Singal agreed. “The [Union] may be bigger than it was before … but it is certainly smaller than it would have been had it retained all of the … work,” he wrote.
Although IBEW has claimed victory in arbitration and the first appeal, Singal did not grant the union’s request to be compensated for attorney’s fees and court costs.
Legal fees are not all of Spillane’s worries, however. He’s looking ahead to the next collective bargaining agreement, and he doesn’t see an eager partner in the company that’s taking the union to court a second time.
“As we’re getting ready for our contract negotiations coming up next July, FairPoint has been really bad with the union,” he said. The union has asked the company to start bargaining now, Spillane said, to ensure smooth workflow for customers and to help both parties plan ahead based on realistic expectations for next year.
Company spokesperson Sabina Haskell said FairPoint leaders are in frequent contact with the union about various issues, but it’s unclear when contract negotiations might start.
“We obviously plan on having good constructive conversations with the union leadership, and those will happen when the time is right,” Haskell said, underscoring the pressure FairPoint faces within an increasingly competitive industry. “We certainly want to be positioned for success in the future and we certainly are proud of our employees and the contributions they make to our company and to the customers,” she said. “To to that end I think the conversations will be very constructive.”
It’s not an optimism shared by Spillane.
“The company just doesn’t even want to hear from us,” he said, “which is a shame because this is our company. We’re all invested in our company, we’re certainly invested in our pensions, and the last thing you want to see is a company go belly-up.” Spillane said he anticipates the company will drive a hard bargain with the union next year in order to deliver profits to investors.
“The company’s basically giving us the middle finger,” he said.
And though the parties will continue to meet in court, Spillane said the union’s goal is to meet at the bargaining table.
