CWA Leadership Authorizes Strike at AT&T West

WASHINGTON, September 11, 2024 – As an ongoing strike against AT&T Southeast enters its fourth week, Communications Workers of America leaders authorized a separate strike against AT&T West Wednesday. The 8,000 affected CWA workers were still on the job as negotiations resumed today.

“We expect AT&T to come to the table ready to engage in good faith bargaining so we can reach an agreement that recognizes our value to the company and provides family-supporting wages and benefits for our members in California and Nevada,” CWA District 9 President Frank Arce said in a statement. “If they don’t, we are ready to strike.”

CWA members voted down a tentative agreement with AT&T West last week and voted in April to authorize a strike. With leadership greenlighting a strike, the union’s president would just have to set a date to initiate a work stoppage. 

In the Southeast, where 17,000 workers have been striking since August 16, the union alleged AT&T refused to bargain in good faith over the wages and health benefits for a new contract, sending low-level representatives to negotiate, and going back on previous agreements. The company denied this.

AT&T provided a “final offer” contract to the Southwest workers on Sept. 4 after the union pulled out of federal mediation, but it appears the parties resumed direct negotiations. The company put out a statement Monday saying, “We reopened discussions on the terms of the final offer we submitted to the CWA on Sept. 4 as we continue the constructive negotiations we’ve engaged in since day one.”

Also, an anti-union group called the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund said it’s been providing free legal aid to AT&T workers looking to remove CWA from their workplaces, most recently in Louisiana and Mississippi. The group said it supported other employees filing decertification petitions with the NLRB earlier this summer, ultimately putting more than 800 AT&T workers in three states outside the CWA’s perview. 

AT&T did not immediately respond to a request for comment.