396 Issues Later — Looking Back, and Looking Ahead

By Jeff Miller, Editor/Communications Director

Joe Beirne, CWA's founding president, was clearly in the throes of terminal cancer when I met him my first week on the job as CWA News editor. Although gaunt and weak, he came to the office from his hospital bed that day with fire in his eyes to dictate his president's column, which we titled "Nixon's Economic Doubletalk" for the February 1974 issue of the paper.

Beirne ripped the administration for five years of economic mismanagement that had cost thousands of jobs, and also for Nixon's recent and lame claim that the economy was doing fine. (Soon, the country was in the grip of one of its worst periods of "stagflation," surging joblessness coupled with rocketing prices.)

Beirne had just announced the bright jewel of his extraordinary career — national bargaining with the Bell System, replacing a maddening process of negotiating with 22 separate companies. However it would be his successor, Glenn Watts, who would harvest the victory that August with a record Bell settlement — a 36 percent wage-benefit hike over three years for a half-million workers. Beirne lived briefly to see it but died that Labor Day.

I didn't know then that I was living through labor's heyday. In the 1970s, union representation in America was about 25 percent of the workforce — more than double today's rate of 12 percent (and less than 8 percent in the private sector). It was a time when collective bargaining elevated standards everywhere, and most Americans had employer-paid health care and pensions.

(With a slow-drip decline ever since, our working middle class has fallen into trouble.)

The union movement's power and stature in that period was such that even a Republican president like Richard Nixon wouldn't think to appoint a labor secretary without first clearing it with AFL-CIO head George Meany.

As the pages of the CWA News would report, tougher times were coming for unions in the 1980s. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan responded to a strike by the air traffic controllers union, PATCO, by firing and replacing all 11,345 workers, signaling to corporations that our government now sanctioned unionbusting. NLRB appointments and policies soon took on an anti-labor tilt. A new "union free" consulting industry bloomed.

For CWA, the government's breakup of the Bell System in 1984 ended a golden era of bargaining gains and steady membership growth rooted in telecom. It would be up to the next CWA president, Morton Bahr, to map a different path for growth — organizing aggressively in the public sector and other fields and bringing in merger partners, beginning with the International Typographical Union in 1987.

Health care was looming as a huge national problem, paralleling a steady decline in union representation overall. In 1989, the issue hit home hard when Nynex, the Northeast Baby Bell, demanded that 60,000 workers start paying premium costs. CWA members held the line, but only after a bitter 17-week strike. Ever after, bargaining over health care has remained the elephant in the room every time CWA and any other union goes to the table.

It's amazing to have worked with all four of CWA's presidents in just under 35 years, and I can say that every one of them has been exactly the right leader for his time. Today, Larry Cohen and his team are energizing not only the grassroots of CWA but the whole union movement to fight back — to reignite the militant spirit that built our movement in the '30s and '40s. 

They have marked a clear strategy for us: Restoring the collective bargaining power that created the middle class — through passing Employee Free Choice. Demanding policies to create good jobs here and ending bad, race-to-the-bottom trade deals. Creating a national health care system like every other advanced nation has.

It's the fight of our lives. I won't be writing about these issues anymore in the CWA News, but I promise I'll still be part of the fight.

Jeff Miller is retiring Dec. 31, after 35 years of writing and editing the CWA News.