Frontier Communications and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union have ratified the labor agreement the two parties reached on Aug. 3 representing local employees in West Virginia.
Set to expire in August 2017, the new agreement covers nearly 1,500 West Virginia employees who work in 42 West Virginia counties and serve more than 500,000 residential and business customers. This includes a mix of customer service technicians, network support technicians, construction technicians, call center representatives and many other employees who support service delivery in the state.
CWA and Frontier began contract negotiations last June. Since the contract expired this August, the telco and the CWA had been working under a tentative labor contract. During this period, Frontier and the CWA worked on numerous and complex issues amidst a series of contract extensions.
Dan McCarthy, president and COO for Frontier, said a big part of the contract is about driving job growth in the Charleston Contact Center, which is a customer service call center for West Virginia.
The service provider continues to make progress in garnering new agreements with its union workers. Over the past five months, the telco reached agreements with the IBEW and CWA unions representing workers in Nebraska, New York, and its Western state territory, including California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
The service provider has also gained union support in its home state of Connecticut, one of the major hurdles it had to clear in moving ahead with its pending acquisition of AT&T's wireline network infrastructure in the state. Connecticut CWA Local 1298 President William Henderson III gave his support for the deal in July. Initially, Henderson opposed the sale because he said neither Frontier nor AT&T (NYSE: T) had issued a whole lot of information about their business plans.
However, Frontier's AT&T Connecticut wireline deal is now mired in regulatory limbo as the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) denied a settlement the telco reached with state officials.
For more:
- see the release
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