T-Mobile Call Center Workers Mobilize Against Closures

The ad appeared in the March 28 edition of the New York Times, and got a lot of media attention in Germany.

CWA activists and T-Mobile USA workers are spotlighting the company's bad decision to close seven call centers, affecting the jobs of 3,300 workers.

From Pennsylvania to Texas to Oregon, workers are meeting with community leaders, local elected officials and others to fight for their jobs.

The seven centers slated to close are: Allentown, Pa.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Frisco, Texas; Brownsville, Texas; Thornton, Colo.; Redmond, Ore.; and Lenexa, Kansas.

CWA has been working with T-Mobile USA workers who want a union voice. The German union ver.di, which represents T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom workers in Germany, has played a major role in this effort, standing up for the rights of workers to choose union representation without the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that T-Mobile USA has created.

This week, a full-page ad in the New York Times featured a call by 11 prominent German political leaders and scholars who told Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile that U.S. employees "should not be influenced, pressured or intimidated by employers if they exercise their basic right for freedom of association."

Tomorrow, T-Mobile activists and supporters will rally outside the Allentown, Pa., call center to protest the company's decision to close the facility. More than 400 Allentown workers will lose their jobs in three months.

"There's no other job here that pays even remotely that well for the trade we're involved in," said Jim Brilhart, a technical support specialist in Allentown. "It's difficult for a lot of us locally."

Brilhart added, "This is a serious blow to the local economy."

Across the Atlantic, ver.di members will hold a picket line on Friday, bringing attention to the ongoing violations of workers' rights at T-Mobile USA as well as their own negotiations with Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile.

Starting next week, be on the lookout for ads on Facebook, Google and other prominent websites, spreading awareness about T-Mobile's actions and an online petition. The message: T-Mobile should bring back work it has offshored to Asia and Central America, and keep our call centers open.

CWAers also will be working with call center workers in Frisco and Brownsville, Texas, two more locations that T-Mobile management has put on the chopping block.

Blake Poindexter, a technical support specialist in Frisco, said he's unsure about his future job prospects. But he continues to work with CWA to gather support from U.S. representatives in Texas to co-sponsor an anti-offshoring bill that penalizes American companies that ship jobs overseas.

"I want to save anyone else from having to go through this," he said. "I wouldn't want to put anyone through what I'm having to go through, ever."

T-Mobile promised employees that it would hire back many of 1,400 dismissed workers and help others transition into new jobs. But, a week later, many employees aren't too hopeful.

Poindexter said he and his colleagues were simply instructed to go to the company's website to start applying for one of the 1,400 open positions "as if we were random people on the street looking for a job. I don't know how much is true, how much they're going to help me," he said.

Jon Brookshire, a fellow Frisco-based technical support specialist, looked at the openings and discovered that to keep his current position and not take a drastic pay cut, he would have to move to either Albuquerque or Colorado Springs. "Both those economies over there are a lot worse than Dallas, so that's kind of a gamble," he said.