Opinion ID: 2641881
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: FairPoint's telecommunications operation

Text: On April 1, 2008, FairPoint purchased Verizon New England, Inc.'s (Verizon) telecommunications operations in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. As a term of purchase, FairPoint agreed to hire all former Verizon employees, represented -2- by the Union, in those states. FairPoint and Verizon negotiated a Transition Services Agreement under which Verizon's employees and systems remained active through February 1, 2009 (the cutover date) so as to ensure continuity of service during the transfer of operations and ownership to FairPoint. This appeal concerns FairPoint's Wholesale Group, which is responsible for facilitating the purchase of access to FairPoint's operational infrastructure and services by smaller, regional telecommunication operators. These purchase orders are grouped into Access Service Requests (ASRs), which are complex orders requiring personal service, and Local Service Requests (LSRs), which are simple orders generally completed by an automated system, without human intervention. At the time of FairPoint's purchase, 94% of Verizon's LSR orders were fully automated; only the remaining 6% of more complex LSR work was routed to employees. FairPoint intended to complete a number of system upgrades prior to the cutover date, so as to match this 94% percent flowthrough rate by the time it took over Verizon's operations. Consequently, FairPoint expected that only a small percentage of complex LSR work would be completed by Union employees. Its original staffing plan included no reference to subcontracting. As the cutover date approached, however, FairPoint realized that its flowthrough rate was significantly lower than -3- expected, only around 60%. It also became clear that the transition in ownership would require a ten-day blackout period, during which all orders would be handwritten, resulting in a significant backlog. These unexpected obstacles created additional staffing needs not addressed by FairPoint's original staffing plan. FairPoint approached the Union and explained that it would need to hire a bubble workforce until the backlog created by the blackout period had been resolved and the flowthrough rate neared 94%. FairPoint estimated this would take between sixty days and six months. Subsequently, FairPoint hired TeleTech, a Canadian company, to staff the bubble workforce. Beginning in February 2009, TeleTech staff handled simple LSR work -- the work that would have been otherwise fully automated -- while Union employees handled more complex LSR work.1 Despite FairPoint's assurances that this bubble workforce was temporary, the simple LSR work was never allocated to Union employees. In September 2010, the work was indefinitely transferred from Teletech to APAC, a subcontractor located in Utica, New York. 1 TeleTech originally completed some ASR work as well, although all of that work eventually returned to the Union and is not in dispute here. Some simple LSR work was also completed by Union employees based in Portland, Maine. This was usually as a result of FairPoint's Single Point of Contact program, which allowed clients to have all of their service needs, simple and complex, handled by a single representative. -4-