CWA Builds Global Support For T-Mobile Workers

Above, ver.di gives big coverage to the campaign for fairness at T-Mobile. CWA President Larry Cohen and ver.di Executive Board member Lothar Schröder outline the TU global union at UNI forum.

T-Mobile and parent company Deutsche Telekom are global operations. So CWA has been pursuing a global strategy to make sure T-Mobile USA workers get the union voice they want.

Deutsche Telekom is very positive about its productive relationship with ver.di, the union representing German workers at T-Mobile and other companies. But it allows T-Mobile USA to intimidate, harass and even fire workers who want a CWA voice. T-Mobile USA workers are warned by managers not to take a union leaflet, because workers and organizers are being watched. That behavior wouldn’t be tolerated in Germany.

A year ago, CWA and ver.di announced the formation of TU, a union to represent T-Mobile workers in Germany and the United States. Since then, the campaign has taken off, with ver.di leaders and members pushing DT hard to end its double standard for T-Mobile USA and German workers.

• At the UNI Congress in Nagasaki, Japan, CWA President Larry Cohen and ver.di Executive Board member Lothar Schröder described the joint activities that ver.di and CWA have conducted over the past year, and outlined more of the campaign to come. The project has caught on strong among ver.di members: More than 50 ver.di members leafleted outside the DT annual meeting last May, and ver.di leaders and members leafleted outside call centers in Richmond, Va., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and other locations. At a workers’ meeting in Bochum, Germany, 2,000 customer service employees stood to show solidarity with their T-Mobile USA?counterparts.
  
  
  
• Unions worldwide have been visiting German embassies in their home countries to express concern about DT’s double standard when it comes to workers’ rights. The German government is a major shareholder in DT and is influential in the company’s operations. Most recently, union delegations in Italy, Cameroon and Costa Rica met with German embassy officials in their home countries.
  
  
  
• Customer service workers around the world, including CWAers at the customer service professionals conference, sent thousands of postcards to DT CEO Rene Obermann, calling for fairness and bargaining rights for T-Mobile workers worldwide.
  
  
  
• CWAers have been leafleting outside T-Mobile retail stores and call centers in Texas, California and other states, and have been meeting with store employees to provide information and answer questions.

The campaign also focuses on investors. Most recently, the Treasurer of the state of Pennsylvania, Robert McCord, expressed his concerns to Obermann. McCord invests Pennsylvania’s $80 billion in assets, including state employee pension funds, and some of those funds are directly invested in Deutsche Telekom. McCord wrote: “I am also worried that the market value of T-Mobile may be adversely affected by poor labor relations. What might result from a disenfranchised workforce and the associated negative publicity for T-Mobile?”

With an active legislative strategy, CWA also won the support of nearly every Democratic member of the House Education and Labor Committee, plus seven Republican members of Congress, who signed letters to Obermann calling on the company to respect workers’ rights in the United States.

Participants at the UNI global forum show solidarity and support for TU and  T-Mobile workers.

T-Mobile USA is the fourth largest wireless company, with about 20,000 workers eligible for union representation. T-Mobile uses the same kind of tactics as Verizon, which permitted Verizon Wireless to intimidate and fire union supporters and shut down centers where workers wanted a CWA voice. CWA represents about 42,000 workers at AT&T Mobility.

Read more at www.loweringthebarforus.org.