NorthwesTel’s unionized workers are undervalued

I don’t know who’s calling the financial shots on behalf of NorthwesTel, but this letter is to you.

This year’s capital program, particularly the Service Improvement Plan, is in peril. If it doesn’t get done this year, how will you answer the CRTC when they ask, “What gives here?” How will you answer interventions by the likes of Telus when they ask why they should pay as much for NorthwesTel’s supplementary funding for 2002?

At what point will you give up on your pride and admit that the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a skilled, knowledgeable workforce, are not your enemies or dime-a-dozen grunts? When will you concede that we are your valued partners in the telecommunications industry of the North?

You have about 200 people still at work whose work you do value. I believe they do worthwhile work as well, and you compensate them handsomely. Why do you not concede that we do worthwhile work and compensate us as handsomely and appreciatively?

I think you do acknowledge the worth of our work, because you are paying your managers up to $50 an hour to do our jobs, catering their lunch, robbing them of their well-being and family life, in order to maintain service. If you acknowledge the worth of the work by endeavouring to keep providing it, then why not acknowledge the worth of the employees who do that work?

We could have asked for parity, but we are asking instead for dignified wages that are still a cut below the managers whose work you appreciate.

We could have made restoration of airfare and northern benefits a condition of a new contract, but we haven’t, at least not this time.

At what point will your pride give way to acknowledging that we’re all partners in providing the best possible service in often hostile weather, lonely stretches of forest and tundra, horrific transportation costs and a thin and volatile market?

Dial it direct or do without. Phone broken? Sorry, that’s not important because the workers who normally do it aren’t important. Don’t know the phone number? Sorry, if it’s not in the book, don’t bother trying to phone them. Don’t know the rate to call there? Sorry, dial it and find out when you get your bill.

Want a phone hooked up? Sorry, you can trot down to use whatever pay phones work and aren’t full of coins, or bother your neighbour.

Geoffrey Capp
Whitehorse