"Please Try Again Later"

By Charles P. Alexander

Phone workers walk out, but the calls still go through, sort of

"Operator, well, could you help me place this call?/ See, the number on the matchbook is old and faded./ She's living in L.A./ With my best old ex-friend Ray."

If the jilted lover in Jim Croce's 1972 pop ballad Operator had been trying to reach his old girlfriend last week, he might have heard a polite but unresponsive recorded message: "I'm sorry, but due to a work stoppage, there may be a delay in answering your call. Will you please try again later?" The operators were on strike against AT&T, as were phone installers, maintenance workers and repairmen. In the first nationwide telephone walkout since 1971, some 675,000 members of three unions (Communications Workers of America, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Telecommunications International Union) were demanding higher pay and greater job security.

Harried and hurried, AT&T's 227,000 supervisory personnel worked shifts as long as 14 hours to fill in for the strikers. Thanks to the high level of automation in the phone system, most service continued to be remarkably smooth. Direct-dial calls generally zipped through the computerized networks with no trouble. But people who needed information or help in making long-distance calls encountered bothersome delays. Mary Lynn Graham, an Ohio State University journalism student, had to try four times over 30 minutes before successfully making a collect call to her parents in Dayton. Ohio Bell reported that on the first day of the strike its supervisors could handle only 153,000 operator-assisted long-distance calls, instead of the normal 289,000. Phone installations were postponed, and repair work was held up. Southern New England Telephone admitted that problems normally fixed in a day were going untended for as long as four days. Troubleshooting managers swapped suits and ties for work shirts and blue jeans as they clambered up telephone poles and crawled into manholes. Many had never done repair work before; armed with diagrams, they got a quick, on-the-scene education. In San Francisco, two supervisors for Pacific Telephone embarked on a fairly routine repair of a neighborhood box of circuits at 6 p.m. and did not make it back to their office until 4 a.m. Said Eileen Short, Pacific Telephone's maintenance manager: "Sometimes it's the blind leading the blind. They're hanging in there, but we'll see how long they can." Adding to the pressure, vandals slashed telephone cables and temporarily cut off service to several small pockets of homes and businesses across the U.S.

Among the places hit: parts of Miami, Dallas, Detroit, Reno, suburban Philadelphia and a few towns in upstate New York. New Jersey Bell reported 25 acts of sabotage during the first three days of the strike, including a cut cable that disrupted service to a state police barracks and Fort Dix, a major Army base. Though direct evidence linking striking workers to the crimes is scarce, they are naturally the prime suspects. In one case, a striking Southern Bell employee and his grown son were arrested for pulling the wires out of a telephone box in Gainesville, Fla.

On the picket lines, the mood was militant. In Denver, strikers carried signs that read MA BELL ABUSES HER KIDS. Violence occasionally erupted. In Brooklyn, strikers tossed eggs at people crossing a picket line and scuffled with police. Three officers suffered cuts and abrasions, and three strikers were arrested for disorderly conduct or inciting to riot. In Atlanta, Picketer B.J. Griffin was hit in the mouth with a BB, apparently fired by a sniper, outside a downtown Southern Bell office. After spending the night in a hospital, Griffin was back on the line the next morning.

Meanwhile, in Washington, AT&T and the unions seemed to be far apart on terms for a new three-year contract. The company offered raises of up to 3.5% in the first year, plus cost of living increases over the rest of the contract that would amount to 75% of the rise in the consumer price index. But Communications Workers President Glenn Watts, representing some 525,000 of the strikers, declared that his union wanted "at least double" what the company was putting on the table.

In addition, the unions demanded company-financed training programs to upgrade employee skills and a voice in decisions about the introduction of new technology, which the workers fear could threaten thousands of jobs. AT&T, however, was eager to gain givebacks from the workers. The company asked, for example, that employees pay up to 25% of the cost of their medical insurance, a suggestion that the unions flatly rejected.

A T & T's chief negotiator, Rex Reed, met briefly with Watts several times last week, but the talks were fruitless. Watts, who has led three previous rounds of bargaining with AT&T since 1974 and has always won big wage gains for his union, predicted that the strike could go on "a very long time." Said he: "At the moment, I don't see any kind of an immediate agreement at all. If the company's negotiators have any intention of changing their position, they're the straightest-faced poker players I've ever been up against."

Hanging over the bargaining is AT&T's impending breakup. To settle an antitrust suit, AT&T's local operating companies will spin off into seven independent regional units next Jan. 1. Because of uncertainty over how profitable each will be, both labor and management seemed anxious to strike the best deal they could before the divestiture occurs.

Even in the past, the regional divisions of the Bell System have complicated the contract ratification process. The nationwide strike in 1971 lasted only a week, but 32,000 employees of New York Telephone rejected the agreement and stayed off the job for seven months.

Union leaders admitted last week that a prolonged strike could not shut down the telephone system, but they warned that service would gradually deteriorate as the company fell further and further behind on repairs. If that happens, the busy signals and "I'm sorry" recordings could become an increasingly frequent annoyance. --By Charles P. Alexander.

-- Gisela Bolte/ Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Gisela Bolte This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.