US workers dial up a victory

The unions want to work less overtime

Workers at one of America's biggest telecoms companies have won the right to organise and wage increases after a 16-day strike.

The walk-out by 87,000 workers at Verizon, the local telephone company that provides services to 27m customers from Maine to Washington, DC on America's East Coast, had disrupted repairs and directory assistance calls.

Bell Atlantic's Ivan Seidenberg drove the merger

Under the terms of the deal, the workers won a wage increase of 12%, stock options, and limits on overtime and the transfer of jobs. They also won the right to organise the fast-growing, largely non-unionised mobile phone division.

Verizon is the second biggest US telecoms company by revenue, and a partner with the UK's Vodafone in a mobile phone joint venture. The company was formed in June by a merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE.

It was facing a backlog of 200,000 orders for new phone lines and 80,000 repair requests as the strike carried on.

Cutting hours

At the heart of the contract dispute was the issue of overtime, with workers claiming that the company regularly schedules them to work 50 to 60 hours a week.

The Communications Workers Union claims that "relentless forced overtime" has taken its toll on family life and produced "speed-ups and harsh work rules" in call centres.

The company argues that most overtime is voluntary, and says it tries to schedule overtime so employees know when they'll have to work ahead of time.

Although agreement was reached on limiting overtime for repairmen to 8 hours each week, talks were still continuing in one region about limits on overtime for call centre workers, leaving 35,000 workers in the Mid-Atlantic region still on strike.

Mobile phone workers

One of the key issues was the wages and conditions of workers in Verizon's mobile phone subsidiary, which is the largest mobile phone company in the US, and about to be floated separately on the stock market.

Those workers currently receive less job security, fewer benefits and lower pay than other Verizon workers, despite the huge growth potential of the mobile phone industry.

Under the terms of the deal, mobile phone workers will be able to sign up to the union by signing membership cards, rather than having to vote in a recognition election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

Unions have found it difficult to win such votes in recent years, as companies employed consultants to argue against the union case..

High visibility

The strike has been one of the most visible in the nation, with the union picketing over 300 telephone offices and holding a mass rally at the company's headquarters in New York, targeting the company's shareholders.

The stock of Verizon had fallen sharply on the New York stock market as investors feared that the company's expansion plans would be hurt.

The strike is part of a revival of worker militancy in the United States during the election year, which began with the union-backed demonstrations against the world trade talks in Seattle last December.

A dispute with its pilots has also hit profits and shares at United Airlines, the world's biggest airline.

The union vote is now being courted by Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who has pledged to include trade union rights in any future free trade agreement.