There ought to be a better way to go, in registering dissatisfaction with at tentative contract settlement than a “wildcat strike.”
About 400 employees of Mountain Bell Telephone and Western Electric Co., staged a short wildcat strike Wednesday to protest a three-year tentative labor-management contract accepted by the Communications Workers of America. Picket lines were set up at Mountain Bell facilities in Salt Lake, Provo, Spanish Fork, and American Fork, news dispatches said.
The CWA did not sanction the walkout.
Local union officials said the workers who chose to leave their jobs in the Wednesday strike were dissatisfied because the bulk of a 31-per cent wage and benefit increase over a three-year period would go to employees at the upper level of the pay scale.
Wildcat strikes, conducted outside the framework of regular labor relations, do not contribute to peaceful, orderly solutions. Indeed, in this case, it is extremely vague why the dissatisfied workers elected to strike against their employers – the people who pay their wages – when their beef apparently was with the uni0n’s negotiating team.
The advice of the local union would seem timely: Vote either to ratify or reject the proposed contract, as is every members right, but under regularly-accepted procedures.
The vote won’t come until union locals in the Mountain Bell system first settle local issues in negotiations now under way in Denver, with a deadline of Saturday, according to news accounts.
Labor-management relations can be touchy at best in some cases. Patience and forebearance should be watchwords, plus a determination to operate within the established framework.
Fortunately, in the Utah wildcat strike, vital telephone service was not interrupted, since company supervisors took over for employees who walked out. Otherwise, the strike could have been a great deal more serious.