Union makes wake-up call to Baby Bell

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 | by David R. Sands

A humorous advertising campaign bolstered labor union's position in contract talks with phone company.

The most controversial comment in five months of bitter contract talks between Bell Atlantic Corp. and its union may have been a belch: The Communications Workers of America, or CWA, enlisted the same ad agency that handled Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign to create the burping, refrigerator-raiding, technology-challenged "Larry the Outside Contractor," star of an unusual $7 million television, radio, print and direct-mail public-relations effort to wrangle a better deal at the bargaining table.

"It was clearly designed to send a message to the company and its negotiators," says Jim Margolis, a partner at Greer, Margolis, Mitchell, Burns & Associates, the Washington firm that organized the campaign. "They've spent a lot of money building a public image. We're letting them know the public will hear the other side of the story."

Union leaders say tough new corporate tactics and weakened labor laws have made strikes far more difficult to win, leaving them grasping for new ways to exert bargaining pressure. Labor experts say such nontraditional tactics - sometimes known as "corporate campaigns" - will become more and more common.

"The CWA was just in no position to challenge Bell Atlantic head-on, so they have to start looking at alternatives," says Charles Perry, labor-policy professor at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia.

With the previous three-year contract having run out in August, Bell Atlantic and CWA negotiators reached settlement in January. Union officials called the final deal "a total victory," crediting the ads with helping to pressure the company into agreeing to a package close to the union's original demands.

The stakes for both sides were high. Bell Atlantic sought more flexibility and lower costs in preparation for challenging AT&T and other telecommunications giants in a range of phone and information-service markets. The union was equally eager to negotiate a deal in line with its pacts with the six other regional phone companies. Concessions to Bell Atlantic - including a pay raise below the 10.9 percent, three-year agreement to which the other regional companies had agreed - would have set a damaging precedent. The union also was reeling from huge layoffs at AT&T and the prospect for more throughout the industry.

CWA spokesman Jeff Miller said the contract justifies the union's heavy investment in public relations. "When you judge it in light of our other contracts and in light of what the company was offering last August, I think it will be clear the settlement met our goals," he says.

Not surprisingly, Bell Atlantic spokesman Eric Rabe has a different view, calling the Larry commercial "mean-spirited" and saying the ads may have prolonged the talks. "I've heard [CWA President] Morty Bahr say he thought the ads were effective," says Rabe. "I'd say just the opposite. I think it made people here dig their heels in a little more deeply." Rabe concedes, however, that Bell Atlantic did assemble a number of consumer focus groups to determine if the union ads were hurting the company's image and that the company prepared commercials to counter the union spots but never saw the need to run them.

Bell Rung

The most notable ad placed by the Communications Workers of America, or CWA, was the 30-second spot starring Larry, a hapless outside contractor. The ad was designed to dramatize the risks to phone service if union service technicians were replaced by inexperienced outside help.

While a family cowers in terror, the slovenly Larry checks out the icebox before shorting the electrical system and destroying the living room in a shower of sparks and smoke in a futile attempt to fix the phone.

According to Jim Margolis, a partner at Greer, Margolis, Mitchell, Burns & Associates, the firm that organized the campaign, telephone technicians are one of the few groups of service workers people still were comfortable having in the home. "There are not many strangers that you feel safe leaving the keys with for two hours, and we played on the fact that you may soon be getting a Larry," says Margolis. "That resonated very strongly."

Bell Atlantic spokesman Eric Rabe notes that it's extremely difficult to short a home's electrical system while fixing a phone, "even if you were trying to." But the union itself set limits, says Margolis, insisting that the spots be pointed but humorous. "We could have had a few beer cans falling out of Larry's truck, had him staring at the daughter, had him eyeing a billfold sitting out on a table," he says. "But our message was that these people could be incompetent, not that they were dangerous."

CWA officials express satisfaction with the effectiveness of the ads, though measuring the effect of an ad is difficult.