CWA Puerto Rico 911 System Workers Get a New Executive Director

After 18 months, CWA Local 3010 members have a new executive director of Puerto Rico's 911 system. The union has spent the last year bringing to light the previous director's mismanagement of the emergency agency and calling for his removal.

CWA Local 3010 President Rafael Castro Torres talks about the positive change for the 911 emergency system in Puerto Rico.

CWA Local 3010 President Rafael Castro Torres said union members consider the departure "a victory similar to signing a bargaining agreement."

The new Executive Director, Juan G. Morales, has already met with workers and listened to their ideas about how to increase revenues for the island's 911 system.

"He took our ideas very positively and called a meeting to review what we had done," he said.

It's a sea change from the workers' experiences over the past 18 months in a struggle with bad morale and the atmosphere of distrust created by the former director, a political appointee without background in emergency management or administration and who let the workers know at the outset that he didn't care much for unions and that it was going to be his way, or the highway.

Here is Torres speaking about the developments.