Building Bargaining Power For Better Benefits, Jobs

The Employee Free Choice Act is important because it will restore the ability of workers to have a voice on the job and a union contract. But it's also the means for workers to increase their bargaining power and to be better able to use their collective voice to maintain and improve health care coverage, pensions and wages. It also gives CWA the bargaining power to keep jobs from being contracted out and returned from offshore locations. 

That's true across CWA industries, from telecom to manufacturing.

Employers know this too, and that's why some of them fight so hard to block workers' rights to organize and bargain a union contract.

Verizon has made clear that setting up the former MCI operation as Verizon Business — a separate, non-union company — was intended to "wall off" union workers at the core company and limit their bargaining power.

Currently, CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers represent about 40 percent of eligible Verizon workers — including Verizon Business, Verizon Wireless and Verizon Information Services — about 97,000 workers.  If Verizon was not following its anti-union game plan and workers in those operations could freely choose union representation, union density at Verizon would be at least 60 percent.

And over the past several years, Verizon has been shifting resources from the wireline sector — or selling off these lines altogether, especially in more rural areas — to wireless and other new technologies which the company hopes to keep non-union.          

"The contrast between Verizon's behavior and that of AT&T and AT&T/Cingular Wireless couldn't be clearer," said CWA Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach. "As employers move on to new technologies, they can work with us to succeed, or they can try to leave us behind. But as Verizon is learning, we will fight hard to ensure that our members have opportunity and access to the jobs of the future and that all workers have the benefits of union representation."

At AT&T, where the company has agreed to neutrality and card check recognition in new businesses and technologies, CWA has been able to build bargaining power and win an agreement to restore some 2,000 jobs that had been contracted out and shifted offshore.

To make similar gains at Verizon, organizing at Verizon Wireless and Verizon Business is critical. Nearly 400 Verizon Business technicians in New York and New England are standing up for a union voice — more than 60 percent of those eligible — and have the support of elected officials and community leaders throughout the region in calling on Verizon to recognize their right to representation.

So far, Verizon is sticking to its anti-union strategy, steering workers to anti-union propaganda sites like the National Right to Work Committee and holding captive audience meetings. The company issued a ten-page attack on CWA, filed with misinformation about union representation and particularly about the benefits of CWA-represented workers compared to former MCI technicians and non-union represented employees at the company, who lost their pensions last year. 

Keep up with the campaign to build bargaining power at Verizon at www.freechoiceatverizon.com and ga.cwa-union.org/verizon.