Hundreds of Maine workers on strike against FairPoint Communications are girding for a protracted labor dispute with the telecommunications carrier.

FairPoint has requested a police detail to watch over picketing employees at two locations through the end of the month, according to the chief of the Falmouth Police Department.

Additional Images

Susan Baron, at right, a FairPoint Communications worker, waves to a passing motorist Thursday as she pickets outside the FairPoint building in Portland with, at left, Brooke Blake and Julie Dubail, fellow International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers members. The workers are accusing FairPoint of negotiating in bad faith on a new labor contract. Portland Press Herald photo by Gabe Souza

At one of the picketing sites in Portland, Matt Hayes, a striking splice service technician, said he has been saving money in preparation for the strike for the last year at the direction of his union, whose leaders anticipated the work stoppage.

“Today was our last paycheck,” Hayes said Thursday, as rain streamed down on the few die-hard strikers who braved the torrential nor’easter. Hayes said his family is financially prepared for him to remain on the picket line for three months, plans he and other union members began making more than a year ago.

“Hopefully it doesn’t come to that,” said Hayes, 36. “Some people have already made arrangements for secondary employment.”

About 2,000 FairPoint employees in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont walked off the job at midnight Oct. 16 after six months of disagreement between workers and their unions over the terms of a new employment contract. The previous contract ended Aug. 2, and the unions had authorized a strike in July, but union officials delayed the work stoppage.

Falmouth Police Chief Ed Tolan said FairPoint has agreed to pay for the cost to station one Falmouth officer and at least one Portland Police Department officer to keep watch over picket sites at both ends of Davis Farm Road, which straddles the Portland-Falmouth municipal boundary.

Tolan said that in accordance with his officers’ contract, strike details are charged at double time for the officers who are assigned there. In Falmouth, depending on an officer’s rank and seniority, FairPoint is paying roughly $70 an hour for the service.

So far there have been no incidents involving strikers that required any Falmouth officer to file a report, Tolan said. Strikers so far have followed the rules police have set out, which allow picketers to make emphatic motions and yell at incoming vehicles they believe to be occupied by FairPoint management, but they are not permitted to touch or stop cars or purposely step into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

The picketing employees have been compliant so far, Tolan said.

“As long as it continues that way, we’ll keep one officer over there,” Tolan said. “If we have to go two, we’ll go two, and FairPoint is on board with that.”

Pete McLaughlin, a spokesman for the two unions representing the workers, has said the company refuses to back off in its demand for roughly $700 million in contract concessions.

The company, in turn, has said that it must lower labor costs to remain competitive.

Negotiations stalled in late August, when a committee of union representatives submitted a proposal they said would save the company about $210 million. Within hours, FairPoint rejected the proposal and said the negotiations were at an impasse. It then unilaterally implemented a plan it had proposed in April, a move the company contends is legal according to federal labor law.

“(FairPoint Communications) would prefer negotiated agreements, but feels the offer being implemented … is fair to its hard-working and valued workforce. It is regrettable that the issues could not be resolved through bargaining,” Angelynne Amores Beaudry, FairPoint’s communications director, said in a written statement Aug. 28.

The unions disagree on the legality of the unilateral contract implementation and have taken the disagreement to the National Labor Relations Board, charging that FairPoint bargained in bad faith, a legal term that means a company’s bargaining tactics are not truly directed at reaching a labor agreement.

Ellen Messing, a labor attorney at Boston-based firm Messing, Rudavsky and Weliky, is not involved in the FairPoint case, but she said that typically charges of bargaining in bad faith made to the NLRB trigger an investigative process that sometimes can take weeks.

If the charge is substantiated, the NLRB will file a complaint against the party found to have violated labor laws. The dispute would then go before an administrative judge if the parties cannot come to an agreement before then.

Occasionally, Messing said, the charge to the NLRB, or the filing of a complaint by the agency, is enough to bring the parties back to the table.

“Sometimes efforts are made to break the logjam,” she said.

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