Police in Maine and New Hampshire have been called at least three times in the past two days to respond to reports of striking FairPoint Communications workers allegedly harassing non-union technicians hired to replace them.
Police answering the three calls said they didn’t find any illegal activity.
Additional Images
Meanwhile, as the first nor’easter of the season lashes the region, the company continues to refuse to release details about the “comprehensive contingency plans” it claims to have in place to protect the telecommunications network that Mainers rely on, including the state’s 911 system.
Wednesday marked the sixth day of a strike that saw nearly 2,000 FairPoint workers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont walk off the job after accusing the company of negotiating in bad faith on a new labor contract. Roughly 800 of those striking workers are in Maine, and have been picketing the company’s facilities and job sites throughout the state since Friday. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers represents about 1,700 of the total workers in the three-state region, and the Communications Workers of America represents nearly 300.
North Carolina-based FairPoint has hired non-union temporary workers to replace its striking employees. However, the company has refused to provide details about the replacement workers, including how many there are and where they’re from. When asked if they had received the training needed to work on a telecommunications network, FairPoint spokeswoman Angelynne Beaudry said they had.
“Yes, they are skilled and qualified to do the work,” she said.
The company on Tuesday accused the unions and their members of causing service disruptions by intimidating its temporary workers and preventing them from servicing customers. The company also claimed “union sympathizers” were behind a phone-jamming campaign that targeted its customer service call center, clogging phone lines and preventing customers from reaching the company with legitimate service requests.
The unions denied the allegations, and criticized the company for leveling the accusations without providing details or evidence.
Beaudry said the company has logged more than 100 incidents of “various forms of disruptive actions” throughout northern New England, including in Maine.
Police have been called on aggressive pickets.
Portland police received one complaint Tuesday from a FairPoint replacement worker who said he was being followed by striking workers. An officer responded and determined that there was no violation. Following someone, as long as the follower does not interfere with the work itself, is not against the law.
John Harmon, a resident of Londonderry, New Hampshire, also called the police on “very aggressive” pickets, he said Wednesday.
Harmon called FairPoint after he noticed his landline lost its dial tone. A non-union FairPoint technician arrived at his house Tuesday morning, shadowed by two pickets who had followed him to the job site.
“When they arrived, the pickets from the – I guess the local union – were blocking the technician from climbing the poles and stopping him for doing his job,” Harmon said. “The contractor was very annoyed and very nervous and didn’t want to get involved. They got into a yelling match. … That’s why I called the police.”
The police arrived and told the pickets they needed to move away from the pole so the contractor could do his work. However, by that point the FairPoint technician was shaken by the experience and decided to return Wednesday, which he did with a second technician.
“So they came back today and the same pickets came back today, but instead of two of them they brought reinforcements – they brought a third person,” Harmon said Wednesday from an Internet phone. “So instead of one technician, two technicians came out with a cherry picker truck.”
Harmon called the police a second time and alleged that the pickets continued to be aggressive and hampered the ability of the technicians to do their work.
“If they were peaceful, I wouldn’t have said anything,” he said.
When reached Wednesday afternoon, Harmon said the technicians were still working on the line. He noted that he never felt personally threatened by the pickets.
Detective Chris Olson with the Londonderry Police Department confirmed that police were called to Harmon’s location Tuesday and again Wednesday. He said the responding officers asked the pickets to move back in both instances, which they did without further incident.
Peter McLaughlin, business manager for the IBEW 2327 in Augusta, admitted that striking workers are following FairPoint’s temporary technicians to customer homes and other job sites to picket on the spot.
“We’ve just been picking up the scab workforce as it comes into place,” he said. “Where we can pick them up and find them we certainly are picketing their work locations.”
As long as they are obeying traffic laws and not creating unsafe conditions, mobile picketing at FairPoint job sites is within the rights of striking workers, he said.
That may be, Harmon said, but he wanted his phone fixed and the pickets prevented that from happening.
McLaughlin said the unions do not want to intimidate customers.
“These are our friends and neighbors we have here,” McLaughlin said. “We’re not going to be doing anything to jeopardize our relationship with our folks.”
FairPoint’s Beaudry reported Wednesday evening that the storm had not caused any service disruptions.
“At this point, we are not aware of any material impact,” she said.
On Monday, FairPoint’s Maine president, Mike Reed, updated the governor and representatives of the Maine Public Utilities Commission and the Public Advocate’s Office on the company’s contingency plans to maintain its telecom network during the strike and impending storm. FairPoint’s network, which consists of nearly 300,000 telephone poles in Maine that carry telephone and DSL lines and fiber-optic cables, not only provides telephone service to thousands of Mainers, it also carries the state’s 911 calls and is leased to major cellphone carriers like AT&T, which use it to carry out-of-state cellphone calls.
Tom Welch, chairman of the Maine PUC, said the meeting consisted of a “very high-level conversation.” When asked whether he left the meeting satisfied with the company’s contingency plans, he quipped that “the PUC never uses the word ‘satisfied’ when talking about utilities.”
However, he said nothing in the meeting raised any alarms.
“There was nothing that came out of the meeting that changed the level of our vigilance in respect to what the company was doing,” Welch said.
Tim Schneider, Maine’s public advocate, also attended the meeting. The Public Advocate’s Office doesn’t have technical expertise, so Schneider declined to make a judgment call on the company’s contingency plans.
“Given the regulatory tools we have, we’re relying on the company to say whether (its plans are) sufficient or not,” Schneider said.
The reality is, beyond that, there’s not much anyone can do.
“Unfortunately, the only way to verify that the company’s plans are adequate is to see how their network weathers the storm,” he said.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.