The CWA is actually a broad coalition of workers in various communications fields, with the past two decades seeing massive expansion in the fields represented. Per their website, here are the fields the CWA has unions in:
Given the healthcare workers, public workers, higher education workers and public safety workers involved, it's clear this isn't purely a communications workers union, and it's interesting that groups from these industries have decided to go CWA and not SEIU, AFSCME, NEA, etc. But that's neither here nor there.
The CWA has been hit hard by outsourcing of telecom jobs and big media mergers, among other things. There's been a few big headlines recently:
Dow Jones and its subsidiary Wall Street Journal being potentially bought by News Corp. The WSJ writers, among the 2000 Dow Jones employee members of The IAPE Local 1096 of The Newspaper Guild, are worried that News Corp's reputation of meddling in the journalistic affairs of its properties will destroy the integrity of the world's financial paper of record (the editorial board is already on the side of Fox News, News Corp's "journalism" flagship, but news reporting at the WSJ remains independent of bias). And they're not going down without a fight:
Wall Street Journal reporters skipped work Thursday morning to demonstrate the need for editorial independence as owner Dow Jones & Co. weighs a $5 billion offer from Rupert Murdoch, the employees' union said.I can't imagine how Dow Jones, a company with absolutely no competition, could justify cutting healthcare benefits, but I suppose they've just gotten cheeky given the current new hot summer corporate fad of slashing benefits to increase profit. Dow Jones is working to find an alternate bidder, so it'll be interesting to see where that goes.
Some Wall Street Journal employees across the country didn't show up for work, the IAPE-CWA union said Thursday in a prepared statement, also citing languishing pay talks...
...Employees also are protesting New York-based Dow Jones' proposal to cut health benefits and limit pay.
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NABET-CWA, the broadcast workers union, is teaming up with Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa to fight back against Disney-ABC's plan of freezing worker pensions under the faulty "Pension Protection Act of 2006".
The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), could impact ABC's scheme to freeze the pensions of NABET-CWA members. The network sprang the pension demand on NABET several weeks into contract talks in March, prompting members to vote strike authorization.Another Orwellian-named bill that, in effect, does the opposite of what its name implies. Although it didn't end up working with the EFCA, I like the strategy of engaging the senators that labor works so hard for, and asking them to create legislation that will eliminate doubt that undoubtedly corporations and the slanted NLRB will exploit. The article also mentions Disney-ABC's $35 billion in revenue and $6 billion in profit, as well as Robert Iger's near million dollar pension starting at age 65, in addition to his insane current salary.
"'ABC wants to take our healthy, successful, well-funded pension plan and freeze it, and they're using the current Pension Protection Act as an excuse to do it," NABET-CWA President John Clark said. "This law needs to be changed and we commend Senator Harkin for his efforts in that direction.
Clark and other critics of the 2006 pension legislation say that rather than ensure a secure retirement for workers, the law has led even hugely profitable companies such as ABC-Disney, Lockheed Martin and IBM to freeze their defined benefit plans; Verizon froze its defined benefit plan for non-union employees. The problem is that under the bill's funding requirements, many companies would have to make large contributions to their pension funds in a short period of time. Instead, some are simply dumping their plans.
"This is just plain wrong," Harkin said. "If a company is profitable enough to afford gold-plated pensions for executives, then it can provide a pension for workers who generated the profits by paying for those pensions."
CWA research economist, Bob Patrician, who spoke about the ABC situation at a news conference with Harkin on June 28, said the threatened freeze "would reduce the benefits that our members will receive by 25 percent - a minimum of $18,000 per year at age 65."
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And as always, the fight to get Verizon to allow their wireless and business workers to unionize, which, if you take a step back, looks and sounds absolutely ridiculous. Let them unionize? This is THE best example of the huge changes the EFCA would bring.
Trying to get Verizon, formerly MCI, to allow in unions, has been a long term struggle that has created an powerful and coordinated wave of union action. While Verizon promised in 2000 to stay neutral in unionizing efforts, they have systematically interfered and punished worker-organizers. While they aren't above firing people, one of their most effective strategies has been walling off their traditional, landline workers, a breed that is dying, and not allowing unionization to spread to the growing wireless and business divisions.
And like politicians and corporate behemoths, the CWA is using the power of cheap, internet video to spread its message:So what's Verizon to do? Verizon Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg is attempting to restructure the telecommunications industry, or at least where Verizon fits into that industry. Verizon's approach to the future is to grow the business while lessening the impact of unionization. How? By quarantining already the unionized technicians, sales people, and service reps of core Verizon from the rest of the growing employee population by building cordon sanitaires around their unit. The end result: unionized Verizon lacks the density that ideas need to spread effectively.
As it stands now, unionization at core Verizon is concentrated to workers who handle POTS -- that's Plain Old Telephone Service. The Seidenberg approach is to not let that high rate of unionization in core Verizon infect the rest of the company as it grows or acquires new units. Verizon has long tried to keep the unions out of Verizon Wireless. Now it's attempting to do the same with other units as they are added to the amalgamation. Case in point is Verizon Business, aka VZB. VZB used to be part of MCI until last year or so, and is now operated as a separate, non-unionized business unit under the umbrella of Verizon Inc. Verizon is moving more and more services and clients and accounts to VZB -- so rather than getting rid of existing union jobs exactly, they're just growing the areas where non-union jobs currently thrive.
Cingular is really organizing-neutral, and as a result, 80% of its workforce, or 38,000 workers, are labor-represented. And AT&T workers, long given a hard time when trying to organize, are now union represented after Cingular's buyout of the fellow telecom giant. If you're one of 700,000 CWA members, make the Cingular Switch and receive 5% off, a nice touch by the CWA to show how labor is willing to work with employers for a shared profitable destiny.
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So the conference starts tomorrow, and as speeches are given and news breaks, I'll be all over it.
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