IV. Organizing
A.- Virginia RodriguezJones, CWA Western Region, Organizing Coordinator
It's not easy to organize. The CWA is probably the largest communication union in the world. But the July 14, 1994, closing of Conexión Familiar at Sprint is the worst example of how an employer will fight unionization.
Regarding organizing, the CWA took the following steps at its last convention.
1) The CWA increased the organizing budget from $2.5 million to $8 million, which is 10% of the union's budget.
2) It was agreed to place greater emphasis on organizer development: both from within ranks and from outside.
3) It was resolved that locals were to be encouraged to sign up into a national organizing network, focusing special attention to the locals in the network.
4) Training is to be given special emphasis, both with materials and schools.
5) There are to be regular reviews so as to learn from experience. Annual organizing retreat to look back, analyze successes and failures, make plans for the year ahead, especially in context of what is taking place in the industry, both nationally and locally.
Regarding the CWA's organizing approach, it's becoming more and more difficult to organize in the private sector. Between 1965 and 1968, on average 7,534 certification elections were held each year, 300,000 workers each year. The election win rate was 59%. By 1990, union elections declined to 3,623. The win rate was 44.5%, meaning only 79,814 new members.
Organizing is most effective when you:
1) Build a strong effective organizing committee.
2) Do 1on1 systematic action throughout.
3) Prepare the work force for the antiunion drive.
4) Do bottomup, aggressive organizing. Act like a union from the beginning and prepare workers beyond the election for bargaining.
The telecommunications industry is the hardest to organize: cable TV, wireless phone service, new subsidiaries, computers, MCI and Sprint. The idea is to try to inoculate the worker from what the employer will do and have preparation for bargaining before the election.
In wireless, there has been success where neutrality agreements exists. It's hard to organize because the wages are low and there's high turnover.
The long distance competitors that have formed since deregulation, we've gotten to the point of cardsigning. MCI shut its Michigan center down after card signing. Sprint is a second example.
We have to organize at every single service center and every single operator center. With La Conexión Familiar, these were Latino workers. They were there in San Francisco, California, right behind local 9410. They sold long distance service. It was a well hidden secret that La Conexión Familiar was part of Sprint. It wasn't more than a few months before they made contact with the local. There was rampant favoritism. The conditions were such that they had no drinking water.
The first contact was made in February; in April, we had cards out. On June 1, we petitioned. They were paid $7 an hour. But that was all you could expect to get.
After we petitioned, the company started the rumor that the company would shut down. The workers held very firm. There was an election scheduled for July 24th. The company called them together one week before the election and told them they 'd be shutting the place down.
This was devastating. It affected not only the 197 workers of the bargaining unit, but all 235. We did not expect it. We didn't believe the company Sprint would do such a thing, especially since part of the company was unionized. They had local phone service organized.
We then mounted a legal campaign and an outreach campaign to try to pressure them to reopen the work place. This company closed down because of the union and not economic conditions. The NLRB ruled in our favor. To get that enforced, the NLRB had to go to the Courts and the Court ruled against the Board. We contacted the telecommunications unions in France and Germany where Spring was trying to form alliances. They were very helpful. We were able to get a lot of support for the Latino workers. The workers had expectations that this would have a better ending. In the end, the place remains shut down. The workers remain to this day without this work. The moral of this story is that we went into this drive expecting to win it. In the face of this, the company chose to take the extreme measure of shutting this down.
The STRM became aware of this. They did file charges with the NAO under the NAFTA side agreement. Filing charges on the side agreement is a good tactic; the workers' story comes out and the NAO has to make a determination. The hearing was in February. There has been no decision forthcoming from the NAO. The good thing that came out of this is there was another round of bad publicity. But it's frustrating. That's the recourse that there's available. But it doesn't have any teeth. Maybe that will come out of this.
Given the difficulties, the CWA is trying new approaches to organizing. These include:
_ Seeking neutrality cardcounts through bargaining
_ Do coordinated national campaigns (examples: Sprint, NCR [AT&T])
_ Develop links with international unions (examples: Northern Telecom, La Conexión Familiar)
_ STRM example: Crossorganizing training led to assistance. Similar tactics have been used in port drivers organizing and the MaxiSwitch drive.
What else? We've tried to work more in coalitions, such as the Jobs with Justice campaign in Seattle. In Cleveland cable, we fought for workers' rights boards. In cable, we have also sought to encourage community mobilization to support bargaining rights.
There is a new approach to organizing by the AFLCIO. The question is no longer whether to organize; it's now a matter of knowing how to do so. Without the ability to organize, as telecommunications workers we are looking at something that is unstoppable. That's the question. How do we do this? This is a key problem we face as communication workers: how to deal with companies that are nonunion.
B. José Luis Jimenez STRM, Mexico
The main organizational challenges that we face are questions of an external nature, but this above all forces internal changes. In our recently held union convention, a national telecommunications strategy was established, with state participation, but also union participation. In this project, one has to protect universal service (the necessity of service for all popular classes). There needs to be a clear regulatory framework. The only business that is regulated is Telmex. The other businesses do not have even a single service requirement.
Another aspect that is fundamental is to create the conditions for assimilation of technology. Many developed countries spend 79% of the budget on research & development. In Mexico, it's only 3%. We favor the position that while Telmex will no longer be a monopoly that it should remain an industry leader. Clearly, we will wear the company badge, but only if our employment is preserved. As well, we are putting forth the idea that all decisions regarding reengineering be approved by the union and the workers.
Regarding our policy of alliances at the union level, we have been active in the MaxiSwitch and La Conexión Familiar campaigns. There has been a strong campaign against Sprint. Our union has developed a broad policy of alliances with the CWA, the CEP, and most recently with Costa Rica. We hope to develop international alliances vis a vis transnational enterprises for a code of conduct that will be respected.
In Mexico, the most important union organization is the Labor Congress (Congreso de Trabajo or CT). In the CT, a deep crisis has developed. The CT does not even satisfy the interests of official ("corporatist") labor. This results in a loss of influence for CT, but a loss of power for workers. One group of unions, among them the STRM; the SME (electricians' union); SNTE (the teachers' union), which is the largest union in Latin America and a number of other organizations. The STRM in 1990 founded the Fesebes (Federation of Unions in Goods and Services' Businesses), an organization that began to group together unions which are not in agreement with government policy.
Parting from the privatization wave of the government, they now have proposed to privatize Social Security. The main institution of the Social Security system is the IMSS (Mexican Social Security Institute). A strong opposition movement against the privatization movement created a new organization, the Union Forum. Beginning with 3 unions, the Forum now brings together 26 unions, including streetcar workers, pilots (ASPA), workers at the DINA truck company, university workers, the federation of workers in the state of Mexico [adjacent to Mexico City], Notimex [official news agency] workers, Volkswagen workers, IMSS workers, electricians (SME), STRM, workers at the UNAM (STUNAM), workers at the University of Nuevo León [another state of Mexico which includes the city of Monterrey]. The Union Forum is an important organization that challenges the structure that we call "union cronyism" [charrismo sindical].
We are also pursuing the unionization of workers throughout the telecommunications industry. The tradition of unionism in Mexico includes such things as ghost contracts [contratos fantasmas] and rat unions [sindicatos blancos]. The decision has been made to fight to ensure that workers in competing telecommunications companies have real unions. If possible, we'd prefer that they affiliate with the STRM, that is the idea.
This is the focus of our new struggle, an issue that addresses the interests of the telephone workers _ the need to fight for union representation. If we fail to get representation for these workers, at least we need to form alliances with their unions. The idea is to create a national union. But we haven't been able to do it. We have to begin to discuss this more. AT&T is coming to Mexico and it will have to establish a collective agreement.
C. Alf Madsen, TWU Business Representative, Vancouver BC, Canada
After listening to the situation faced by the workers in the maquiladoras, I'm almost ashamed to say we have problems. We've been in our own little world in Canada. And now the real world has come.
Unlike my brothers from Saskatchewan, we don't have cold winters. We have warm, wet ones. We don't do stories. We do theories.
Reengineering. Restructuring. Quality circles. My favorite, absolute favorite, is "empowerment."
My theory: every two years, they take all of the top management consultants to meet for a week and then they come home and go to the biggest suckers in the world: the CEOs. They go to each CEO, one by one, and say, "We're going to make you the most successful CEO of the world. They collect $56 million and go back to the island.
This year, they went to the island, and came back with a new message. Guess what? The new message is that downsizing isn't working.
Deregulation is the same thing as job loss. So in the mid1980s, we came up with a plan. It is based on the following formula: companies want money, unions wants job, and governments want votes. So we got to use the fact that workers vote to put pressure on the government.
One of our biggest problems is membership apathy. We have to reorganize the organized to make this strategy work. Recently, the CRTC allowed convergence, which allows telephone companies to enter into cable and cable companies into the telephone business. Put everyone on a levelplaying field and let them kill themselves. We are fortunate in Canada in that we have one or two major cable operators and they're unionized.
The CRTC decision excepted BC Tel. These are our future jobs. This is our emerging market. The CRTC made this decision because of Canadian culture. BC Tel is 50.1% owned by GTE. We can't allow an American company to compete.
We got into a program. It was based on the idea that we want jobs and the federal government's platform is job creation. Rogers, the cable company in BC, added "negative option" billing, in which the customer had to specifically opt out of added services or pay more on his or her cable bill. Rogers became a hated word in BC.
We said that if BC Tel cannot compete in small communities, BC Tel will pull back. This got the local communities to support us. By the end of the campaign, BC Tel would take 60% at least of Roger's customers. We put out newspaper adds and had literally thousands of responses.
It came down to the Minister of the Heritage Department which was blocking a reversal of the decision. We went to Ottawa. I said, "I don't know one American citizen who's ever worked for BC Tel. They're all Canadian citizens. They're all from British Columbia." The bureaucrat's response was, "That's an amazing statistic."
Our message was "Someone is taking something from you." You organize people to help you. It's been very successful. Letterwriting, town council meetings, radio ads. You use this to get what you want, it really works. Through this type of action, we held off deregulation for 8 or 9 years. We didn't stop it, but we sure prevented a lot of pain during those 8 or 9 years. We have organized all the unions across Canada with a simple goal: To stop the pain.
Recently, we had a joint meeting with CEOs across Canada. We told them we can be their strongest allies or their strongest enemies. We intend to be the qualityofservice police. We are pursuing our own agenda, which will benefit them, us, and society as a whole. This adherence to a social strategy has gained us a new level of respect. The good news is that the drive to downsize appears to be on its way out. Profitable companies cannot be allowed to profit by castingoff workers and reducing service.
What do the CEOs see in this plan? Telephone companies in Canada must cooperate with unions or they will be swallowed up by the "Pacmen" of AT&T, MCI, and Sprint. In British Columbia, Sprint is the biggest competitor to BC Tel. There are 10 Sprint jobs in British Columbia. And AT&T is sitting, just waiting. The only thing holding them up are the foreign ownership laws. Already, they own about a third of Unitel. So there needs to be a social contract established across Canada before changes in foreign ownership rules come out.
Our motto has got to be: "If it moves, organize it." That's what it's about. To win, to win for your members and you use every lever you've got.
Previous Section - Session III - New Technology and Reengineering
Next Section - General Discussions
Return to TecsChange home page
