Alcatel-Lucent 2014 Bargaining Report #2

Bargaining Report #2  

Alcatel-Lucent Installation

In his opening statement, the company’s bargaining chair, Steve Muscat, said: “For Alcatel-Lucent, these negotiations are about a new collective bargaining agreement that improves the company’s flexibility to deliver its services, improves our competitiveness and simplifies how we operate.”   This is a polite way of saying they want to make many, many changes in our current agreement that both cut costs (and therefore compensation to our Installers) and gives them more freedom to reassign and reschedule people with fewer payments.

There have been proposals on shortening the amount of time members have to file grievances, eliminate the differentials for “split or change in tour” and “change in starting time”, change the wage schedules from 6 month steps to yearly steps, eliminate the daily miscellaneous allowance, increase the local assignment range, lower the termination pay schedule, eliminate the city allowances and many more. We haven’t even begun to talk about benefit plan changes yet.  Those discussions will begin next week but we all know what we can expect.

While we will mainly be concentrating on holding out against unreasonable changes in our agreement, the Union also has issues we want to address.  We have passed proposals on changing the status of CSIs, compensating those who home garage for excessive travel time, and protecting Union representatives from unreasonable transfers so they can perform their duties.  More Union proposals will be passed in the next few days. 

The rally at the RITC was a start.  We need every Installer, wherever you are, involved in this contract fight. You should all be wearing red today and every Thursday, showing your support for the bargaining team and finding out from your Local what the mobilization activities are.  This contract bargaining will only be successful if you play your part.

If you haven’t signed up for these reports to be sent to you directly, you can do that by going to http://www.cwa-union.org/alcatel-lucent          

Your Bargaining Team,

Laura Unger

Martha Flagge, Staff Representative

Mike Klein, Local 4050/4090

Rick Mulledy, Local 4390