My story about Bell Canada is based on the fact that I was employed there for a time. During the 1999 strike by technicians and operators, all managers not deemed essential were required to take over those duties. Hence, you had managers who ended up climbing telephone poles and acting as operators.
Unfortunately, for some strange reason, I was deemed essential. You see, I was part of the internal IT group and my manager, who was new to the job, figured that it would be important for me to stick around. However, given that most, if not all, of the other managers that I needed to interact with were all on strike duty, my days were pretty bleak. The floor that I worked on was literally a ghost town, with about 6 people on a floor that normally had around 100 on a normal day.
On top of that, upper management did not do anything to alleviate the pain being felt by the managers. No protection for the managers on strike duty, which meant that most of them were harassed constantly on the job by picketers. In order to avoid picketers, the "essential" managers had to show up around 7 AM and leave at 5 PM. Problem is that police escorts would never show up until sometime between 9 AM to 10 AM...so we had to stand outside in the cold in the middle of February.
When upper management discovered that morale among the managers was dropping at an alarming rate (wow, what a discovery), they decided to initiate a couple of things to boost it up. One of them was the installment of a pool table in some empty office at one of the main buildings. Wow...great...a single pool table in an almost empty building...that helps. Another was to have the cafeteria staff dress up in costumes...so for one week, the cafeteria staff had to endure wearing sombreros while serving food.
Needless to say, I didn't stick around for very long after the strike was over. There were plenty of other reasons for leaving but the conduct of the upper management level during the strike was certainly one of the eye-openers for me.