PORTLAND, Maine - About 800 FairPoint employees will be heading back to work in Maine on Wednesday. They're among the 1,700 workers in northern New England who voted over the weekend to ratify an agreement reached last week, bringing to an end what's being described as the longest strike in recent U.S. labor history.After more than four months of picket lines, and six weeks of federally-mediated discussions, Pete McLaughlin says he's relieved at the breakthrough, and happy. "Happy that all this is coming to an end, happy to get back to work, happy that we came out with as good an agreement as we did," he says.
McLaughlin heads the bargaining committee of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, one of two unions representing the workforce at FairPoint Communications. The unions did not provide the exact vote count.
The deal includes worker concessions on health care, with employees contributing some of the cost under a union health plan. Current employees keep their defined benefit pension, but contributions will be reduced. The contract, which lasts until until August 2018, also eliminates a proposed two-tier pay scale and allows limited use of outside contractors.
McLaughlin says the agreement finds a lot of common ground while at the same time offering workers considerably more than what FairPoint was demanding in August of last year, when it declared an impasse in contract talks.
"Whether it was contracting out of work, sub-contracting, our benefits package, I think we did find some common ground on that was significantly above what was imposed," he says.
FairPoint CEO Paul Sunu says the new pact provides excellent pay and benefits for workers while making the company more flexible and allowing it to invest in new products and infrastructure. In an emailed statement, he said the agreement allows FairPoint to "rationalize its employee costs to position the company to compete and serve the customers and communities of northern New England."
The North Carolina-based telecommunications company, which provides telephone and high-speed Internet service, went bankrupt after buying Verizon's land line holdings in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The company has struggled to become profitable since emerging from bankruptcy.
Professor Gary Chaisson teaches labor relations at Clark University in Massachusetts. "All strikes come to an end," he says. And he says this strike was bought to an end by a rapid realization on both sides that changes were needed to keep the company competitive.
"I guess you could compare it to the long-shoring dispute on the West Coast," Chaisson says. "All of a sudden things move very quickly, and it becomes very obvious to the parties that they really don't want to strike, and that if they can reach a settlement they can live with, essentially they can go and worry about other things."
Things such as competition, globalization, new technologies and other market-driven concerns.