[L]ate Saturday night, minutes before contracts were scheduled to expire, unions representing more than a thousand workers across New England came to a tentative agreement with Consolidated Communications to avert a possible strike.
The unions involved in the negotiations will bring the deal to their members for ratification in the next few days. The agreements mean the company will avoid the sort of painful, protracted industrial action that hit the company in 2014, before it was sold from FairPoint to Consolidated.
The deal was struck after three months of negotiations between the company and some 1,200 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and Communications Workers of America (CWA).
The unions said in a statement that the details of the deals with each union was different, but that they โresponded to their members’ and customers’ needs as well as the profound changes impacting the telecommunications industry.โ
The agreement comes two weeks after union members authorized a strike if Consolidated Communications did not meet their demands on paid leave, health care, and use of subcontractors before the contracts expired.
In a statement on the possibility of a strike at that time, Ryan Whitlock, vice president of human resources for Consolidated, said the company has a long history of โpositive and respectful labor relations across the countryโ and remain โcommitted to doing the same with both the IBEW and the CWA contracts.โ
The new contract will be the first negotiated between the unions and Consolidated Communications, which purchased the New England operations from FairPoint Communications in 2017.
The last contract negotiations under FairPoint’s management were in 2014, and resulted in unions staging a 131-day strike that led to a slew of service delays for customers in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
In the hours before both sides agreed on negotiations, union members had cleared out their desks and trucks in anticipation of a strike.
โThere might have been one or two people in all the states who didnโt clean out their desks. And thatโs because those people were on vacation,โ said Don Trementozzi, the CWA co-chair of the bargaining team, said.
โWe were prepared if the company was going to destroy us, we were prepared to destroy them because we care about our members, our jobs and our customers,” he said. “And we werenโt going to allow this company to come into northern New England to destroy that, and luckily both sides were able to come to agreement where we can work together.โ
Union leaders credit the strike authorization with speeding up negotiations with the company. In the last two weeks, the two sides had come to agreement on such key issues as the use of subcontractors, job security and retirement benefits, so all that was left on Saturday were small details, said Pete McLaughlin, co-chair of the IBEW bargaining team.
โWe had differences but we did come to an understanding, and it was the words at the end that we struggled over,” McLaughlin said “Both sides didnโt love the final language we came up with, but thatโs negotiating.”
Unlike four years ago during the negotiations with Fairpoint, union leaders said that there was constructive dialogue from the very beginning that created the basis for an eventual agreement.
โWe had consistent dialogue early on and thankfully we could bring something out to the membership to vote on, and itโs up to them to decide what to do,โ McLaughlin said.
Bob Udell, Consolidated Communicationsโ CEO, said in a statement that the ability to come to a agreement before the deadline shows the โimprovement in the relationship between the unions and the companyโ since it bought FairPoint. He said company official are โpleased with this outcome and are optimistic our employees will ratify these new labor agreements.โ
If members reject the proposed contract, the company and its workers face three options, McLaughlin said.
โWe could continue to work and go back to the negotiating table, we could strike, or we could get locked out by the company,” he said.
Union members have until Friday to ratify the three-year agreement, which would expire in 2021. Meetings are being held throughout Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.
