Expressing the opinion that negotiating a long-term contract in the middle of what now seems likely to be a short recession was not desirable, the AT&T Corporation proposed an eighteen-month extension of a contract covering 27,900 unionized workers last week. The company announced today that the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) had turned down the proposal. Concerned about the loss of over 17,000 union jobs in the past five years, the CWA made a counterproposal that gave union workers greater job security---to which the company responded by announcing that it plans to begin negotiations in March.
See REUTERS, The New York Times, February 12, 2002