I had to work 12 hour shifts during the last CWA strike in 1989 at PacBell. I drove from office to office over the southern California desert. I worked all the trouble calls and moved on to the next office. During the strike, Western Electric installed and cut new remote Nortel switches. When the strike was over, the old step offices were dead. All the maintenance was done remotely. Half the people who went on strike discovered their services were no longer necessary.
During the same strike, the data center installed huge DLT tape robots on the Amdahl floor. The 30 reel to reel units were removed. They also cut 28 of 30 jobs in that department. The staff that worked on the COSMOS systems also returned to find 8mm tapes installed in place of the old 9-track reel to reel. Staff cut of 100%. The manager could swap all the tapes in 10 minutes each day.
Strikes are opportunities to find out how to do more with less.
I had to work 12 hour shifts during the last CWA strike in 1989 at PacBell. I drove from office to office over the southern California desert. I worked all the trouble calls and moved on to the next office. During the strike, Western Electric installed and cut new remote Nortel switches. When the strike was over, the old step offices were dead. All the maintenance was done remotely. Half the people who went on strike discovered their services were no longer necessary.
During the same strike, the data center installed huge DLT tape robots on the Amdahl floor. The 30 reel to reel units were removed. They also cut 28 of 30 jobs in that department. The staff that worked on the COSMOS systems also returned to find 8mm tapes installed in place of the old 9-track reel to reel. Staff cut of 100%. The manager could swap all the tapes in 10 minutes each day. When strikes hit I saw my dad when it was over. The union made a mistake early in his career of threatening him to strike or else. He got sorted irked at them and did the or else the next 40 years. He didn't strike till he went back outside and even then he wasn't union. The first step supervisors loved it also. They got busted back to craft and made a lot more money because they got paid overtime. Most of the time my dad made more a year than his boss.