Puerto Rican Phone Workers Declare Support for CWA Strikers: Announce Stepped Up Activities in Their

The 87,000 striking workers at Verizon/Bell Atlantic received a message of support and solidarity from their counterparts in Puerto Rico who are also in negotiations with Verizon and who plan a campaign of stepped up mobilization activities beginning tomorrow.

The 4,800 Puerto Rican telephone workers have been in bargaining for several months with the former GTE, now Verizon, which bought a majority share of the island's telephone system two years ago when it was privatized. The employees, members of the Independent Union of Telephone Workers (or UIET, the Spanish language acronym), are now working without a contract. Key issues in their talks center on retirement security and wage levels, UIET leaders report.

A UIET delegate assembly today passed a resolution calling for a sharing of strategies with the Communications Workers of America and other Verizon unions and announcing a campaign of informational pickets and "collective actions" as part of an escalating member mobilization effort.

CWA President Morton Bahr in turn expressed CWA's support of the Puerto Rican workers to UIET President Jose Juan Hernandez. "We share a common struggle for justice at one of the wealthiest and most powerful communications giants," he said. "As our mutual employer has just grown in size and strength with the GTE-Bell Atlantic merger, the bonds that already exist between our unions grow stronger all the time," he said.



Bahr noted that President Hernandez traveled to New Jersey last March to attend and show his support for CWA at a large bargaining and mobilization rally of Bell Atlantic members. Hernandez also addressed CWA's convention in 1999.

Close ties between CWA and UIET were forged two years ago when CWA supported a UIET strike that grew into a huge general strike that virtually shut down the island for several days. When GTE bought the Puerto Rico Telephone Co. shortly thereafter, CWA was instrumental in helping UIET negotiate job security assurances. The unions signed a formal alliance last year to support each other in joint organizing and collective bargaining efforts.