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From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: More About NJ Sabotage
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Date: 11 Aug 89 02:05:14 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 289, message 7 of 8

From: ijk@violin.att.com (Ihor J Kinal)
>I've been scanning the news articles, but I HAVE NOT seen any BELL
>MANAGER accuse the UNIONS of sabatoge.

Then where exactly are the papers getting this info?

Certainly the mere disruption of service is not enough for a newspaper
to print "SERVICE SABOTAGED BY UNION!". Someone must be feeding them
this analysis.

Last I heard it wasn't the practice of non-striking employees to speak
to the press for the phone company during a strike (nor the press
likely to believe their analysis of an outage.) I doubt the unions are
giving this info to the press, so who??? Telepathy?

I'm sure if you called one of these newspapers and asked (and they're
willing to tell you) you'll find they're re-printing summaries of
official press releases prepared by the phone co's PR dept and mailed
to all the major newspapers. Either that or interviewing managers as a
result of investigating some large service disruption, some reporter
looking for an angle, but more likely getting it from "official
sources". Maybe you have some fantasy that newspapers do all this
careful investigation and would never just reprint some company press
release, hah!

> From the nature of Barry's article, though, it would appear, since
>the UNION is not culpable, and that the UNION MEMBERS are not culpable,
>that either the GENERAL PUBLIC or MANAGEMENT of the BELL CO are doing
>this to make the UNIONS look bad.

I didn't say the union was not culpable, I just said I don't know that
they are.

How do you even know there was *any* sabotage? Because some phone
service got disrupted and the phone co blamed it on the strikers?
Maybe, maybe not.

In fact the phone co might feel justified in labelling abandoning
their posts or half-completed work "sabotage", who knows, be a little
cynical, in cases like this it's healthy. Everyone's trying to
manipulate the public.

	-Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade
1330 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202
Internet: bzs@skuld.std.com
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