Daytona Beach, FL - It's coming close to a week since AT&T workers walked out of their jobs in protest of unfair labor practices.
And with 20,000 workers walking out, 5,000 in the state of Florida alone, customers could be feeling the effects.
The strikes began over the weekend as the clock struck midnight last Saturday (August 24th). As the sun rose, workers across nine southeast states, including Florida, took to the streets with picket signs and red shirts in support of their union, the Communications Workers of America.
Then, on Monday (August 26th), protesters in CWA District 3, which encompasses Volusia, Flagler and Seminole County, descended on AT&T's main building in Daytona Beach just off of South Ridgewood Avenue and held a demonstration along both sides of the road outside of the hub.
With these large scale demonstrations, protesters are hoping the telecommunications company gets their message. But, with this many people not working, customers could feel the effects of the strikes.
"20,000 people is a lot of folks to be on strike," said Beth Allen, the Communications Director at Communications Workers of America. "It's 5,000 just in Florida, so a quarter of the workers out on strike is in Florida."
And it's over 100 technicians and other employees in Volusia County alone, not counting the others from Flagler and Seminole.
"They won't be available to respond to service calls and that could have an impact on customers, not having as many people to respond and not having people with the same kind of training responding to those service calls," said Allen.
According to one demonstrator, managers and a small contingency of workers are available to handle some service calls, but with the lack of available technicians and workers a backlog of calls is highly possible.
But, Allen made it clear that the protesters aren't doing this in spite of customers, they're just trying to show AT&T that they want change and they want to negotiate fairly.
"It's important to our members to have the security of a new contract and we want to make sure that we (including AT&T) are doing what we can to work towards an agreement," Allen said.
Demonstrators plan to continue their protests until a fair agreement is met.
