IBEW 1547 Members Laid Off As Cellular One Closes Fairbanks, Alaska Call Center

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Cellular One closes Fairbanks call center

LAID OFF: Employees received no warning of sudden shutdown.
By RICHARD RICHTMYER
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: June 16, 2004)

Workers at Cellular One's customer-service call center in Fairbanks were told to pack up their belongings and leave Tuesday morning after the company announced that it is closing the place and moving its operations Outside.

The abrupt closure put 16 people out of work. Oklahoma City-based Dobson Communications, which does business in Alaska under the Cellular One brand name, said the Fairbanks call center was technically insufficient, given its aging equipment and the relatively small number of customers it serves.

Rather than upgrade the Fairbanks center, the company decided it would be more cost-effective to shift its workload to a regional call center in Duluth, Minn., said Warren Henry, Dobson's vice president of investor relations.

"It was very small and had old equipment," Henry said. "It couldn't be upgraded efficiently because of the size of the call center and the size of the market."

News of the shutdown took the call center's employees, represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1547, by surprise, said Jay Quakenbush, their union business representative.

"They were told at 11 a.m. to pack their desks up immediately, and most of them were back here at the union hall by 12:15," Quakenbush said. "They really should have given us some notice."

Workers at the call center handled billing, technical and other issues for subscribers.

All of the departing workers, who were paid up to $20.15 an hour as well as company-paid pension contributions and full health-care coverage, got two weeks of severance pay, Quakenbush said.

Some got more, depending on their seniority, under the union's labor agreement with the company, Quakenbush said.

The call center closing leaves Cellular One with 112 employees in Alaska, 24 of them in Fairbanks, Dobson's Henry said.

Cellular One opened the call center in 2000, soon after the company began doing business in Fairbanks and Juneau. It handled calls only from subscribers in those areas.

Last winter, the company extended its reach into Southcentral when it took over thousands of customer accounts from AT&T Wireless, which left the state. Cellular One's Southcentral customers have been served by the Minnesota call center since the company took them over.

The 16 workers who lost their jobs in Fairbanks will be given an opportunity to transfer to other available position within Dobson Communications, Henry said. He acknowledged, however, that opportunities in Alaska will be limited.

The company provides cellular service in 16 states and, with Fairbanks closed, now has regional call centers in Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Oklahoma.

"They're welcome to move to other call centers around the country, and there are some sales jobs that are quite similar," he said.

Quakenbush said the IBEW is going to do its best to find the laid-off workers jobs closer to home, and Alaska Communications Systems, the state's second-largest cell phone company behind Cellular One, already has its eye on them.

"We're definitely interested in giving interviews, and we're setting up some pre-employment testing," said Mary Ann Pease, an ACS spokeswoman.

Daily News reporter Richard Richtmyer can be reached at rrichtmyer@adn.com or 257-4344.