Frontier, union extend contract

Monday dawned as a day doublecircled on the calendars of Frontier Communications employees in Connecticut, with a charity golf outing long scheduled for that day — but with the possibility as well of picket lines forming outside the company’s facilities in Norwalk, New Haven and elsewhere.

The golf outing went on, but any labor stoppage is on hold, after Frontier and union leaders agreed to extend to Saturday a contract that expired Monday.

Frontier workers had voted overwhelmingly in September to authorize the Communications Workers of America to call a strike at the discretion of CWA Local 1298 leaders. In addition to compensation and benefits, the sides have been discussing terms for a Frontier proposal to buy out the contracts of an unspecified number of its Connecticut workers.

“There is a path to agreement,” the president of CWA Local 1298 Dave Weidlich Jr. told Hearst Connecticut Media on Monday in an email response to a query on the contract extension. “I am hopeful we can get something done this week.”

On Monday, the union and Frontier joined in common cause, sponsoring a golf outing in Southington to raise money for the Morris F. Tyler Pioneers of Connecticut, a volunteer services nonprofit with a heritage stemming to the early days of the telecommunications industry.

Frontier got a taste last month of another kind of push CWA is capable of mobilizing, after hundreds of workers turned out in Pomona, Calif., accompanied by a giant inflatable rat to protest Frontier outsourcing work to other companies.

“Frontier needs to know that we’re not going to take it anymore — coast to coast, we are going to let you know,” a union organizer said at the California protest, in a video posted online. “Put your money where it needs to be — put your money back into the community, put your money back into the infrastructure.”

Frontier has pledged to maintain service in the event that some 2,100 union members in Connecticut walk off the job, with the company handling a threeweek strike last year in West Virginia through a mix of outside contractors, managers and “representatives from other Frontier organizations,” in its words at the time.

Back in Connecticut, Frontier is at odds with CWA Local 1298 on another front, asking the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to deny the union any formal status as an “intervenor” in a PURA inquiry into Frontier’s financial stability, as the company works down more than $16 billion in debt under CEO Dan McCarthy.

Earlier this month in a PURA filing, a Frontier attorney characterized any union involvement in the hearing as having the potential to “impair the orderly conduct of this proceeding, in that CWA seeks to raise issues, such as service quality, that are outside of the scope” of the inquiry.