The more than 1,700 union workers across northern New England have been on strike since Oct. 17. Contract talks broke down over pensions, health care benefits and the company’s use of contracted workers.
Three chapters of the IBEW and one chapter of the Communications Workers of America had been holding out for 126 days before the agreement, said Mike Spillane, union leader for the Local 2326 chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
“The membership were very well educated going into this dispute,” Spillane said of his 370 members in Vermont. “They knew what kind of problems they were going to face. They were very committed to holding on to what we’ve been trying to hold onto over the years. They were real troopers.”
Spillane and FairPoint declined to comment on the details of the tentative agreement. But details could be revealed as early as Friday because the unions will hold ratification meetings in the morning in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, according to the union coalition Fairness at Fairpoint.
“We’re happy to put this behind us,” Spillane said. “There’s been a lot of customers who have been experiencing a lot of service issues, and those are our friends and neighbors, and we don’t want to see that. We want to get back to doing what we do.”
FairPoint issued a statement saying the company is “pleased” with the tentative agreement, and a spokesperson declined to comment further.
“(T)he new labor agreements will provide employees with wages and benefits that are among the best in northern New England,” the statement said. “At the same time, the agreements permit the company to achieve a much more competitive position in the marketplace.”
FairPoint is publicly traded NASDAQ stock with a market capitalization of $430 million and does not pay a dividend to shareholders, according to the Wall Street Journal. The contract for the company’s employees in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine expired Aug. 2.
The prolonged dispute caused the state’s congressional delegation and Gov. Peter Shumlin to urge FairPoint in December to return to the bargaining table. The company responded in a news release Dec. 18 that the employees had average salaries of $83,500 in 2013, and the benefits in their old contract were not appropriate in what the company called a competitive marketplace.
FairPoint bought telephone landlines in northern New England from Verizon in 2007 and has customers in 14 other states. The company said in the Dec. 18 release that the terms of the workers’ previous contracts included unlimited paid sick leave, and workers did not pay into health care premiums. The company said the benefits were “holdovers from the days of monopoly landline telephone service.”
Shumlin assigned the Department of Public Service to monitor the service Vermonters were receiving from FairPoint while the strike was happening.
Commissioner Chris Recchia said Thursday that his staff had more than 1,200 complaints from FairPoint customers between Oct. 17 and Dec. 31, and he is glad to see people back on the job.
“I think Vermonters have suffered from this work stoppage, and we’ve worked very hard with FairPoint to get customers back on service, and made quite a bit of progress in the last few months,” Recchia said. “I look forward to FairPoint being able to provide exemplary service to the people of Vermont going forward.
“Service quality was not OK before the strike,” he said, “and we were already trying to work with them to try to fix that. It’s still not where it was, but it’s better than where it was at sometime last summer.”
Shumlin said in in a statement that the news is “good for Vermont” and lets the workers get back to serving Vermonters.
“I’m glad the long wait for the workers and their families is coming to an end, and that FairPoint will have a better chance to succeed in its competitive industry under this new agreement,” he said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a harsh critic of FairPoint’s bargaining position, praised the agreement Thursday.
“I applaud the extraordinary courage of the FairPoint workers,” Sanders said in a statement. “They have stood together month after month in opposition to a massive assault on decent wages and benefits. Their efforts deserve the thanks of all Vermonters.”
