It has not been an easy path. We continue to have to work at making it deliver. We are still working to strengthen the trust factor to enable us to become full strategic partners company-wide. But WPOF has been in place long enough so that we can quantify the results. Not because the union is less aggressive, but because problems are being solved before they reach the grievance stage.
Employees have better morale and are more productive.
However, when you extrapolate the survey results from employees who are active in WPOF, the scores escalate in every category. WPOF languished in Lucent after the spinoff. Several years ago, GTE found itself at the bottom of customer satisfaction in several surveys. They concluded that the old ways of doing business were no longer acceptable. For us, what was at stake was whether our members in GTE would have good, secure jobs.