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Sprint Employees Still Bitter About Office Closing
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Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 02:21:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Patrick A. Townson
TELECOM Digest Mon, 26 Feb 96 02:21:00 EST Volume 16 : Issue 82
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 01:24:54 EST From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Subject: Sprint Employees Still Bitter About Office Closing
Imagine if you had a job where you had to raise your hand to get permission to go to the bathroom. Suppose your employer did not allow water or other beverages at your desk, to make it easier for you to avoid bathroom breaks during the work day. What if your employer promised you commissions on your sales then later cheated you out of those commissions making bogus excuses of one kind or another ...
Stories like the above were commonplace when Sprint was operating its telemarketing plant in San Fransisco until almost two years ago.
Now suppose if you worked in a place like that, and when you and your fellow employees began organizing to form a union your employer retaliated by threatening you, falsifying records about your work and making plans to close the office completely. What would YOU do? ...
Sprint retaliated in all the above ways. The company spied on its workers, ordered supervisors to falsify records and to threaten employees individually and as a group with the loss of their job if efforts to unionize continued.
Sprint has always prided itself on its ability to keep unions out of its offices and other facilities. The company was sued for its decision to close its San Fransisco telemarketing office on July 14, 1994, just eight days before a scheduled vote that likely would have resulted in the introduction of a union into the company. The suit claimed Sprint's closing of the office was merely a ploy to avoid union organizing, an unfair labor practice under federal law.
Sprint contends it closed the office because it was losing millions of dollars per year. The judge who heard the case agreed with that reasoning although he found considerable fault in Sprint's handling of the matter. The employees however have continued their agressive prosecution of the matter, and now legal appeals are going on before the National Labor Relations Board. The company is continuing to fight, and as a result now the whole situation is starting to enter an international arena.
If you ask me, I think Sprint should quit while they are still ahead, admit their involvement and try to gracefully deal with whatever happens at this point. If they continue at this point, their already soiled reputation is going to get sullied even worse.
The San Fransisco telemarketing plant was called 'La Conexion Familiar', which is Spanish for 'The Family Connection'. It sold Sprint long- distance service to Spanish speaking clients, offering them monthly bills printed in Spanish, and immediate, default access to Spanish speaking telephone operators.
Because the 250 employees at the Sprint telemarketing office were mostly Hispanic women, the case has drawn the attention of the Mexican government which has decided to make use of an obscure provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement which allows the three participating nations to scrutinize and enforce each other's labor laws.
NAFTA representatives from Canada, Mexico and the United States will conduct a public forum in San Fransisco on Tuesday, February 27 to discuss Sprint's actions. In some respects, the forum will be only ceremonial, since they offer no remedies for the workers. What the workers will get however is the satisfaction of being included in a trinational study to be published on the effects of sudden plant closures on union organizing. The forum and resulting study are likely to present Sprint in a very dark light; giving the public a very bad opinion of Sprint at the start of the vaunted Information Age.
There is a very powerful irony here. Sprint is a very high-tech company at the cutting edge of telecommunications, and it is being associated with employer practices dating back to the 1930's ... there is also a certain irony in the role NAFTA has acquired in the Sprint case because of the fact that the trade pact was vigorously opposed by unions. Through this kind of happenstance, a new legal channel has opened up for unions, although I doubt anyone ever thought NAFTA procedures would get used in this way.
The forum on Tuesday is independent of the litigation currently before the National Labor Relations Board. Shortly after Sprint chose to close the San Fransisco office, the NLRB filed formal charges against Sprint, charging it with 55 violations of labor law and ordering the company to re-open the office and reinstate all workers with back pay. Sprint immediatly appealed that order.
Last August, Judge Gerald Wacknov ruled that Sprint was guilty of all the charges placed against the company. The judge also ruled that Sprint had deliberatly falsified company records to create a phony 'paper trail' demonstrating that Sprint had planned to close the office prior to any discussion of uninization.
Nevertheless, the judge agreed that Sprint had 'valid and compelling economic reasons' for closing an office that was losing customers faster than it was recruiting them and losing millions of dollars in the process. The union is appealing this decision at the present time, demanding that Sprint offer to rehire all the workers and give them back pay.
Sprint has responded saying the worker's claim that the company is anti-union are outlandish. Sprint claims that its local telephone service division has been unionized 'for decades' ... but they seem to have forgotten the company has only been in business for about twenty years and in local phone service for a much shorter time than that. Furthermore, the local operations were unionized *under their previous owners* and not through any decision made by Sprint since that company has owned the locals ...
Sprint claims the workers had to seek permission to go to the bathroom only so that the telephone system being used would not continue to dial residences when workers stepped away from their desk. That seems to be a rather odd excuse considering technology involving predictive dialing systems has long been in place allowing telemarketers to log in and out automatically when they are online or offline. Additionally, Sprint insists that its employees were not told to limit their water intake in order to have to 'go to the bathroom less often when at work'.
Sprint claims they have an 'excellent record' of complying with labor laws having received only two minor complaints since they have been in business. Sprint states that 'to suggest this is a pattern of willful behavior by the company is a 'fabrication created by former employees who have their own agenda ...'
When asked for a specific reason why employees would have attempted to organize, Sprint's response was they really did not know what prompted the allegations against them.
Lilliette Jiron says she knows why ...
A 22 year old single mother who was recruited by Sprint while she was in a high school equivilency program, she said she resented 'being spied on' while in the bathroom by supervisors, and being told 'not to drink so much water, then you won't have to "go" as often ...'
She says she hated seeing workers fired in full view of the rest of the staff. And she says that after promising all the workers they would receive commissions, Sprint then reneged and refused to pay the workers what they had promised. She said that one day when the air circulation system malfunctioned and noxious fumes got into the office with other nearby companies busily evacuating their employees, Sprint made everyone stay on the job for quite awhile longer until the employees began leaving without permission.
Ms. Jiron said when Sprint came to the employment counseling office at her school they flat out lied about the work environment and the promised wages.
Asked why she stayed at that job she said it was because she needed the job to support herself and her child.
She said she was called in to a manager's office one day and told her new job would be to spy on her co-workers. She was told that when co-workers were away from their desk she was to go through their desk and purses, etc looking for union literature. She refused to accept this new 'job', but at the same time she refused to publicly support the union because the manager told her 'if she kept quiet and did not say anything about it' that 'once the union comes we will close here and give you a better job for Sprint working somewhere else.'
On the day Sprint closed the operation, employees were given one hour's notice to collect their possessions and get out of the building. The employees found it incredible that the company had not given them any notice or offered to help them find other employment either within Sprint or at other firms.
Jeff Miller, spokesman for the Communications Workers of America, the union which was attempting to organize La Conexion Familiar employees and is now in litigation with Sprint insists that the company's message was very clear:
"It was intended as an example for Sprint employees everywhere. It was an object lesson. Sprint is saying to its other employees that if they try to organize the same thing will happen to them."
Maybe that is the example Sprint wants their employees to see, but now with NAFTA involved and the very real possibility that Mexico will retaliate against the company in arrangements for international telecommunications traffic, the example and 'object lesson' may well backfire. The real loser may be Sprint. Certainly if the company loses the current appeal before the NLRB, there will be very real financial consequences for the company.
PAT ```
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