ratto
Recycles dryer sheets
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2011
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Has anyone read this article, AT&T Managers Garner Union Skills in Preparation for Strike - WSJ.com? It's about how AT&T's managers are getting contingency planning training for a possible strike on Sunday. I found the story quite amusing, and here are just a couple of excerpts. I'm wondering if anyone has the similar stories from the past and is willing to share at here.
A behind-the-scenes look at AT&T's strike-training sessions, however, shows that preparing managers to fill in for experienced union workers isn't as simple as it sounds.
"After a week of training, the only thing I have retained is how to add adult programming," said account executive Frank Ventrella, in a Facebook entry about his grasp of AT&T's video service. In the event of a strike, he joked, "there is a very good chance I am adding porn to your account."
For some managers, the training is a welcome distraction from the monotony of corporate life. For others, it is a demeaning waste of time—often requiring evening and weekend hours for no extra pay.
In 2009, the last time AT&T had a major strike-duty training effort, the head of its elite labs division emailed a letter of apology to his researchers, who chafed at having to click through "tens of hours" of online tutorials on such topics as "how to use a chain saw," said people who received the email.
The email from Keith Cambron, the division's president and chief executive at the time, acknowledged the stress the training caused the researchers and their families, these people said.
"My colleagues who had to go for training were frustrated that we had studied for engineering and had Ph.D.s and at least master's degrees, and they were asked to go and climb poles," said Prafull Mehta, a former director at AT&T Labs.
The strike-duty trainees take quizzes at the end of each module, ranging from multiple-choice questions on how to diagnose equipment problems to fill-in-the-blank diagrams describing how a telephone signal is transmitted, current and former employees said. One manager said he has more than 20 pages of handwritten notes on "brightly colored yellow paper" to help him memorize scores of acronyms from the first module out of the six that he needs to complete.
In 2009, seeking an added buffer against a possible strike, AT&T temporarily hired friends and family of managers, as well as retirees and managers the company had recently laid off. "Lots of times, I felt really stupid," said Garth Pellet, a 64-year-old retiree who was called back to duty that year. Much of the initial training for his assignment as a telephone lineman involved deciphering "telephonese," he said. He learned, for instance, that "1FR/PIC 10288" meant "one flat-rated telephone, for which the primary carrier is AT&T."