Jamie McGee

jmcgee@tennessean.com

In the increasingly contentious local fight between corporate internet giants, union and AT&T officials say the rights and livelihoods of more than 350 workers have been largely overlooked.

The One Touch Make Ready proposal, which addresses the process of attaching new lines to utility poles, is meant to expedite internet installation, and it has gained support from local consumers frustrated with existing broadband providers. But one potential, unintended casualty is job security for AT&T technicians, engineers and dispatchers, an argument AT&T officials have made the centerpiece of their case against the ordinance.

“All of those guys who work outside, who touch those lines now, will not be touching those lines,” Rick Feinstein, a Communications Workers of America Tennessee representative, said of AT&T workers. “It means they are not going to have work.”

The ordinance, scheduled for final vote Sept. 20, would allow internet providers to hire an approved contractor to adjust all lines on a utility pole at once. Currently, each provider on a pole must move their own line to make room for a new cable. The process can take months per adjustment and Google Fiber says it has significantly stalled its rollout.

Comcast and AT&T have both opposed the measure, citing safety and efficiency concerns, and for AT&T, the ordinance would disrupt its collective bargaining agreement. The dispute has put AT&T and CWA officials, typically on opposite sides of the negotiating table, on the same team.

Because AT&T sued Louisville over a similar ordinance, council members have also weighed fears of a costly lawsuit and a desire to keep local government out of corporate disputes as they consider the need for increased competition. Google Fiber officials have indicated they may cease installation if the ordinance fails.

Few members of Metro Council, typically a left-leaning body, voiced union concerns. Councilwoman Kathleen Murphy pushed for an amendment that would have given more support to CWA, which garnered only 11 votes on a 40-person council. An effort to defer the vote, which would have provided given more time for the companies to develop a solution, failed by a narrow margin, and ultimately, the council sided with Google Fiber on the second of three readings, with a 32-7 vote.

What the Google Fiber vote really means

Deborah Sisco, Communications Workers of America's local president, said she is disappointed in Metro Council's vote and called it a step toward union busting.

“The people who want Google Fiber don’t see the workers that are going to do the job,” Sisco said. “The workers have not been talked about.”

Based on its most recent collective bargaining agreement, AT&T relies on its own, union-represented technicians to move its lines. If another provider, such as Google Fiber or Comcast, hires another vendor to do all the make-ready work in one session, the CWA members' workload is diminished and AT&T is no longer adhering to its contract.

Comcast relies on employees to do the majority of pole work but it also works with local contracting firms that employ Nashville workers as needed, according to spokeswoman Sara Jo Walker.

More providers, more work

Councilman Anthony Davis, a co-sponsor of the One Touch Make Ready ordinance, is not convinced the proposal means less work for AT&T workers. Given the infrastructure activity in Nashville, with three companies enhancing or building their fiber networks, there is plenty of work to go around.

“Right now, they are busy upgrading all of AT&T’s lines to fiber,” Davis said at a Tuesday committee meeting. “More competition being here obviously has helped boost this effort. With AT&T moving forward with their fiber, that’s a lot of work that CWA has to outfit poles with fiber.

“Without a new market entrant, you are not moving the lines on the NES poles. There is no movement.”

The argument Davis and co-sponsor Jeremy Elrod have put forward is that without new companies pressing current providers to improve service, there is actually less work for local technicians.

“Because there is a new entrant like Google, the incumbent providers are having to do more make-ready work,” Elrod said in a separate committee meeting Tuesday.

In at least some markets, AT&T's and Comcast's expansions help them make that case. AT&T and Comcast were not making announcements about fiber internet in Nashville until Google Fiber said it was exploring Nashville for expansion. AT&T also followed Google Fiber to Kansas City and announced plans for Austin almost simultaneously. Comcast picked Chattanooga, where gigabit speed internet is available through the municipal provider, as one of its earlier markets for 2-gig internet.

AT&T Tennessee President Joelle Phillips said in a committee meeting that make-ready work has been steady regardless of Google’s presence.

“We get a lot of requests for make-ready work and have done so long before there was any discussion about Google,” she said.

AT&T also refuted that competition from Google has spurred their own fiber roll-out.

"We’ve been preparing for customer demand for faster internet speeds over a 100 percent fiber network since we began building our U-verse IP fiber-based network in 2007," AT&T spokesman Joe Burgan said in a statement. "The availability of faster speeds from multiple providers today is product of a natural network evolution and less about a new entrant coming into the space, just as the cost of deployment was falling and demand was increasing."

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' local business manager Randy Clark said his electrical union has remained neutral on One Touch Make Ready, but that the addition of Google Fiber has generated new utility pole work for IBEW workers. While IBEW contractors are not performing make-ready work, as many as 40 local workers have been attaching new lines for Google.

IBEW workers can be hired by multiple companies and they are hired project to project. They do receive pension and medical benefits. As full-time employees, CWA workers typically have set schedules and their wages and benefits are negotiated through collective bargaining agreements with AT&T.

"We don't bounce from job to job," said AT&T facility technician José Zuniga, who lives in Cookeville and who has worked for AT&T for 22 years. "I can make plans to go on vacation, I can make plans for my kids to have the things they need all the way through college, I can make plans to retire."

Feinstein said he is concerned that make-ready workers hired by labor unions will be brought in from other states, replacing the local AT&T workers.

“These are not temporary jobs,” Feinstein said. “These are people who have worked for AT&T for maybe five years, maybe 40 years. That’s what’s really concerning. Nobody seems to understand that.”

One Touch could break contract

Because the One Touch Make Ready ordinance gives pole owners rights to determine who performs work on poles, AT&T could delegate work on its poles to CWA workers, Davis said at the recent Metro Council meeting. AT&T owns 20 percent of Davidson County poles.

Chris Levendos, a Google Fiber official, has said that Google would approve of CWA workers performing its make-ready work, as long as it is done in one session, as prescribed by One Touch Make Ready.

“Whomever the pole owners approve to do it in a practical, one-touch process, we would be supportive,” Levendos said at a committee meeting Tuesday.

But, allowing CWA workers to take jobs for other companies, would call for a new contract, and the next collective bargaining agreement is three years away. “That still busts the collective bargaining agreement,” Murphy said.

The provision that only CWA workers perform make-ready work on AT&T lines would no longer apply if the ordinance passed, and CWA would "lose the benefit" of that provision, according to Phillips.

AT&T and CWA filed a lawsuit against Louisville after a similar ordinance passed there this year. Matthew Embry, president of the Louisville CWA chapter, said Google Fiber is not deploying fiber there yet, so the impact on Louisville's AT&T technicians is still unknown. Because of AT&T's own fiber deployment, he expects steady demand from that company alone for the next five to six years.

Embry expects the biggest and most immediate ramifications on CWA workers to be safety issues and weakened bargaining power. Other technicians may lack the same training as AT&T employees and errors made could end up injuring workers on subsequent assignments, he said. And, if the union's bargaining leverage is reduced, that could affect wages, he said.

"We have fought for many years to retain that exclusivity right, so it is a term of our bargaining with the company," Embry said. "If that’s something the company desires, now we don't even have the rights to it anymore because the government has stripped that right from us. It could affect wages because we have less to bargain with."

Reach Jamie McGee at 615-259-8071 and on Twitter @JamieMcGee_.