The Non-Financial Ledger

Picture northwest Montana. The terrain is brutal. Lines go down in weather that would shut most operations, and the technicians who work them know every pole, every junction box, every quirk of the network from decades of hands-on experience. These are the workers of IBEW Local 768. They have a contract. It was hard-won over years of collective bargaining, and it says, plainly, that their employer can only bring in outside workers when none of them are available or when there is a genuine emergency.

Then word starts filtering through the national union network. A local in another state notices something: people showing up to do work who aren’t supposed to be there. Non-union “National Technicians” deployed by Lumen, the parent company, showing up inside jurisdictions where union contracts are supposed to apply. Missouri. Texas. And, as it turned out, Montana.

George Bland, the Local 768 business manager, is the man who has to sit across from management and hold the line. His job is to enforce the contract. So when he sends a formal information request on August 10, 2021, asking CenturyTel to account for how many National Technicians are working in Local 768’s jurisdiction, how long they’ve been there, and what work they’re doing, he isn’t being difficult. He’s doing exactly what the law and the contract require him to do.

What he gets back is a wall. Not an outright refusal, exactly. Something more calculated: stalling, deflection, and a question flipped back at him demanding that he prove why he deserves the information before they’ll give it to him. The company’s senior HR advisor, Keller Noble, asks him in writing why this information is even relevant to his bargaining agreement, given that the National Technicians “are not represented by” the union and “are not performing bargaining unit work.”

That last phrase carries the full weight of the insult. Because Bland’s entire point is that the union has the right to determine independently whether those workers are performing bargaining unit work. The company does not get to be judge and jury on a question that directly benefits the company. But that is precisely the posture CenturyTel maintained for months: we have already decided the answer is no, so there is nothing for you to verify.

The union filed an unfair labor practice charge. Then another. CenturyTel filed exceptions. The case traveled through an administrative law judge, the full NLRB board, and then to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The legal process consumed years. The workers whose jurisdiction was potentially being eroded lived with that uncertainty for all of it. Every month of delay is a month the company may have continued routing work around the contract. Every month of delay meant dues-paying union members potentially watching their job classifications get hollowed out one non-union deployment at a time.

This is the cost that doesn’t show up in any settlement figure. There was no cash payout here, no headline number. What was at stake was something more foundational: the right of workers to know what their employer is doing with their work. Not a generous right, not a special privilege. A right that has existed in federal labor law since 1936, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1956, and reaffirmed by courts ever since. CenturyTel treated it as optional.

Legal Receipts: What the Record Actually Shows

The following are direct quotations from the court record. Nothing below is paraphrased or invented.

“The Union established and demonstrated to CenturyTel the relevance of the requested information about the National Technicians on August 10, upon making its information request.”

NLRB Board Decision, CenturyTel of Montana, Inc., 373 NLRB No. 128 (Oct. 10, 2024)

• This finding directly dismantles CenturyTel’s central defense: that the union never adequately explained why the information was relevant. The Board concluded relevance was established on day one of the request, not at the later hearing as CenturyTel tried to argue.
• The Board found two independent grounds for relevance on August 10: the content of Bland’s email itself, and the admission Bemis made during the follow-up phone call that same day.

“Manager Bemis was aware of his own admission and that the Union sought the information to protect unit work from diversion.”

NLRB Board Decision, CenturyTel of Montana, Inc., 373 NLRB No. 128 (Oct. 10, 2024)

• This is the Board’s direct finding that Bemis knew, in real time, that he had confirmed what the union was looking for. His later courtroom testimony minimizing the call was not believed.
• The ALJ credited union business manager George Bland’s version of the August 10 call over Bemis’s version, finding Bland’s account “far more likely, given the stated subject matter of the email that inspired Bemis to initiate the call.”
• Even in Bemis’s own hedged testimony, he admitted the National Technicians had “been” in the union’s jurisdiction “a few times.” The ALJ noted he “did not deny that unit work was being performed” but “obfuscated.”

“The information requests were plainly aimed at ascertaining whether [CenturyTel] had been violating the parties’ contract by utilizing the National Technicians to perform Union work.”

ALJ Decision, Case No. 19-CA-283839 (Dec. 6, 2022)

• The ALJ rejected CenturyTel’s argument that the union needed to first prove a violation before being entitled to information to investigate a potential violation. That logic, the ALJ found, inverts how labor law works.
• The ALJ confirmed that “preservation or diversion of unit work is a subject of mandatory bargaining under the Act,” meaning CenturyTel had no discretion to withhold this information once relevance was established.

“Why is this information relevant to administering your Collective Bargaining Agreement when these Lumen employees are not represented by [the Union] and are not performing bargaining unit work?”

Letter from Keller Noble, Lumen Senior HR Advisor, to George Bland (Sept. 1, 2021)

• This is the sentence at the center of the case: the company asserting that it has already answered the question the union was asking, and therefore the union has no right to ask it.
• Bland’s response on September 13 was legally precise: “the Union has the right to make an independent determination” of whether the technicians were performing bargaining unit work. That right is what the NLRA and decades of case law protect.
• Noble then doubled down on September 22, claiming the request was “outside the scope of [the Union’s] jurisdiction.” Bland renewed the request with a deadline of September 29. The company ignored it. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge on October 1, 2021.

“A union’s bare assertion that it needs information would be insufficient; instead the union must explain to the employer why the information is relevant. The threshold for relevance is low, however, and the union need not demonstrate the existence of some particular controversy or the need to dispose of some recognized problem.”

New York & Presbyterian Hospital v. NLRB, 649 F.3d 723, 730 (D.C. Cir. 2011), cited by D.C. Circuit, Jan. 13, 2026

• This is the governing legal standard the court applied. The union cleared this bar clearly: it had an email from a national network of locals reporting National Technicians performing unit work in other states, a manager’s direct admission that they had worked in the Montana jurisdiction, and a history of settled grievances over the same conduct.
• The court held that relevance is assessed under “a discovery-type standard,” where “probable or potential relevance” is sufficient. The union had actual, documented relevance.

The Full Chronology: From First Email to Federal Court Order

What They Claimed vs. What the Record Proved

CenturyTel ran a series of legal arguments designed to make the union’s legitimate information request look like an overreach. Each one was rejected.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

The integrity of telecommunications infrastructure in rural Montana depends on workers who know it. Eroding union jurisdiction through non-disclosed non-union deployments degrades accountability chains with real consequences for public safety.

• Northwest Montana is a remote, geographically demanding service territory. Union technicians with long-term knowledge of the specific infrastructure are not interchangeable with nationally dispatched workers unfamiliar with the local network. Service failures in rural areas can affect emergency response systems, including 911 routing and hospital communications.
• The CBA’s jurisdictional restriction exists in part for quality control: it limits who can perform installation, maintenance, and repair work on telecommunications equipment serving businesses and residences. When that restriction is bypassed without disclosure, there is no mechanism for the union to audit whether replacement workers meet the same training and safety standards.
• CenturyTel’s refusal to disclose information about the National Technicians meant the union could not determine whether those workers were dispatched in compliance with the emergency-only or unavailability provisions of the CBA. Without that data, there is no way to know how many times the deployment was unauthorized and what work was affected.

Economic Inequality

The deliberate diversion of union work to non-union workers is a wage suppression mechanism dressed up as operational flexibility. The documented history in this case makes that function explicit.

• The CBA between Local 768 and CenturyTel covers workers who perform installation, maintenance, and repair in northwest Montana. Every hour of that work redirected to a non-union National Technician is an hour of wages, benefits, and pension contributions not earned by a union-covered worker.
• The 2018 grievances and settlements established that CenturyLink, the direct predecessor, had already done this in 2017 and 2018. The pattern continued under the Lumen rebrand. The workers facing this erosion had fought it before, won, and then watched the same conduct resume.
• Lumen Technologies is a national telecommunications corporation. Local 768 represents workers in one regional market in northwest Montana. The power asymmetry is extreme: the company has national legal resources, a national HR apparatus, and a national technical workforce it can deploy wherever it chooses. The union has its contract and the NLRA. When the company refuses to supply information the union needs to enforce the contract, it effectively nullifies the agreement for the duration of the refusal.
• The information request CenturyTel stonewalled was designed to answer a specific economic question: was the company siphoning union work to cheaper non-union labor? The company’s refusal to answer preserved the economic benefit of the diversion while the legal process ran for years.
• The legal standard for information relevance in this context is intentionally low precisely because Congress understood this power imbalance when it enacted the NLRA. The right to information is the mechanism that makes collective bargaining real rather than nominal. CenturyTel’s litigation strategy targeted that mechanism directly.

How the Information Blockade Was Structured

CenturyTel’s response was not a single refusal. It was a sequenced series of deflections that each created delay without technically refusing to engage.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric: What Delay Is Worth to a Corporation

The Corporate Structure Behind the Violation

Understanding who is actually responsible requires mapping the parent-subsidiary relationship that allowed Lumen to insulate itself while its subsidiary ran the clock.

What Now: Who Is Accountable and What You Can Do

The court order compels compliance, but enforcement of labor rights requires ongoing pressure. Here is who is responsible and where to direct it.

Named Individuals in the Record

• John Bemis, Lumen Regional Manager: Made the August 10, 2021 admission that National Technicians had worked in the union’s jurisdiction, then provided testimony at the ULP hearing that the ALJ found less credible than the union representative’s account.
• Keller Noble, Lumen Senior Human Resources Advisor: Authored the September 1 and September 22 letters questioning the union’s right to the requested information and asserting the request was “outside scope” of the CBA.
• Arnell Anderson, National Team Manager for Processing: Received the forwarded information request from Bemis on August 10 and led the internal processing that produced no substantive response for weeks.
• George Bland, IBEW Local 768 Business Manager: The worker representative who filed the request, pursued it through multiple ignored deadlines, and ultimately prevailed at every level of adjudication.

Corporate Hierarchy

• CenturyTel of Montana, Inc. is the direct respondent and the entity held in violation. It operates as a subsidiary of Lumen Technologies, Inc., which provides national resources including the National Technician workforce that was deployed into Local 768’s jurisdiction.
• [REDACTED – Not in Source]: Lumen Technologies board composition and current executive leadership are not specified in the court record. Contact Lumen’s investor relations and executive communications departments for current leadership accountability.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies With Jurisdiction

• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): The primary enforcer of the order. The NLRB’s Regional Office 19 (Seattle) has jurisdiction over this matter. File complaints about non-compliance with the enforcement order directly with the NLRB General Counsel’s office. The Board’s cross-application for enforcement has been granted; any failure to comply is now in contempt territory.
• Department of Labor (DOL): Has overlapping jurisdiction on issues of prevailing wage, worker classification, and the integrity of collective bargaining agreements in regulated industries. Reports about systematic diversion of union work can be filed with the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division.
• Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Lumen Technologies holds federal telecommunications licenses. Systematic labor law violations by licensed carriers are relevant to license renewal proceedings. Public interest groups can file comments in FCC dockets involving Lumen’s license applications.
• Montana Department of Labor and Industry: State-level labor enforcement can supplement federal proceedings, particularly around workplace standards and contractor compliance in telecommunications work.

Grassroots and Mutual Aid Actions

• Contact IBEW Local 768 directly to ask how to support the workers affected and whether the enforcement order is being monitored. Union locals often need public attention to ensure companies actually comply with court orders rather than continuing delay tactics.
• If you are a Lumen Technologies customer in Montana or elsewhere, contact their customer service to state that labor law compliance is a factor in your continued service relationship. Corporate customer-facing teams route this feedback to executive communications.
• Support the IBEW and local labor councils in your area. The Telecommunications Council network that alerted Local 768 to the National Technician deployment is a model for worker information-sharing across regions. That network works only when individual locals are resourced and engaged.
• Organize at your own workplace. The right to information that CenturyTel spent four years trying to deny Local 768 exists because workers organized decades ago and won statutory protection. The NLRA protects your right to organize, join a union, and bargain collectively. The NLRB has a worker hotline: 1-844-762-6572.
• Share this investigation with telecommunications workers in other states. The Telecommunications Council’s 2021 emails documented that National Technicians were also performing unit work in Missouri and Texas. Those situations may not have been resolved.