Documents for buyers
Mary Ward, a Lucent spokeswoman, said the company's vice president of manufacturing, Michael Jones, and other executives are in the process of putting together a sort of offering document for prospective buyers of the Merrimack Valley plant, describing both what Lucent expects it would need from a contract manufacturer and the technical capabilities of the plant staff, who have won numerous manufacturing quality and workplace-safety awards in recent years.
While Lucent has envisioned that many workers would continue to do more or less their current jobs and only see a different company name on their paychecks, Ward said at this point, Lucent can only say, "That's the hope."
Kenneth A. Galdston, an adviser to the Merrimack Valley Project, a coalition of local churches, unions, and other groups that is looking for ways to help Lucent workers, said one great fear is that unionized workers now making US$40,000 and more from Lucent might be paid much less by a non-union contract manufacturer replacing Lucent.
"This whole process, the hollowing-out of the corporation, makes sense from a business point of view, but from a human point of view, it's breaking down a social compact," said Galdston. "Around the country you see a lot of these efforts to unravel a unionized work force, with high-tech jobs that are being turned into temporary jobs."
US Representative John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat whose district includes the North Andover site, said he has been lobbying Lucent executives to try to keep work in the local economy.
"If they're in a precarious financial situation where they have to sell, we would like as firm an agreement as possible with the purchaser to keep the current employees working where they are," Tierney said. "We'd like them to open up and be a little more straightforward and forthcoming about what their plans are, but I'm not sure whether they can be. I'm not sure they know themselves."
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