NYNEX Reports Tentative Pact to End Strike

NEW YORK —  NYNEX Corp. said it had reached a tentative agreement Monday with its two unions to end a bitter 100-day strike after agreeing to pay health-care costs, but a union spokesman said labor leaders hadn’t yet signed off on the pact.

An agreement would end the last of a series of walkouts that hit regional phone companies last summer.

A spokesman for one of the unions, the Communications Workers of America, said it would resume discussions on the proposal this morning.

A company spokesman said that striking telephone employees could return to work as early as Monday.

“We have saved our health care. There are no premiums,” CWA President Morton Bahr told the AFL-CIO convention Monday in Washington. NYNEX officials said the company only agreed to pay the health benefits after eliminating its offers of a partial lump sum payment of wage increases and profit sharing.

Bahr said he had returned to Washington Monday morning from a negotiating session that began Sunday morning and had concluded with the agreement on the companywide framework.

Still to be resolved are local issues such as specific job titles and work rules at the NYNEX subsidiaries.

“The single issue was a fight to protect health-care benefits that were negotiated, fought for, struck for over 25 years of collective bargaining,” Bahr said.

NYNEX Chairman William C. Ferguson said in a statement the health benefits arrangement was “a realistic solution to a very difficult set of issues facing not only the company but the entire nation.”

NYNEX, through its subsidiaries New York Telephone and New England Telephone, provides phone service for most of the Northeast.

CWA, representing 40,000 NYNEX workers, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which bargains for an additional 20,000 employees, struck the company Aug. 6, resisting its attempt to shift health insurance costs to workers. The IBEW had no immediate comment.