Search News
For the Media
For media inquiries, call CWA Communications at 202-434-1168 or email comms@cwa-union.org. To read about CWA Members, Leadership or Industries, visit our About page.
CWA Ready for the Future: Overview
A Strategic Plan to Build Bargaining Power
As directed by convention delegates in last year's Resolution #1, the CWA Executive Board has proposed a strategic plan to retool and energize CWA to meet the enormous challenges facing workers today and in the future.
Building CWA's bargaining power is the central theme of the Board's report and the 11-point action plan that will be debated and acted upon by delegates to the 2006 convention, to be held July 10 and 11 in Las Vegas.
Stronger bargaining power is needed, the report declares, to achieve four overarching goals for CWA and its members — employment security, quality health care, retirement security and restoration of bargaining and organizing rights.
Board members cited the powerful forces and trends threatening workers today in all of those areas: "globalization and rampant outsourcing, a hostile political environment, erosion of workers' organizing and bargaining rights, abuse of bankruptcy laws and ever-more-aggressive employer attacks on our contracts."
The Board noted that the strategic plan is "the product of a great deal of work by thousands of leaders and activists in our ranks — from discussions at local executive boards, stewards and membership meetings, to special conference sessions by each district and sector of CWA, to the many ideas submitted to the Ready for the Future website ga.cwa-union.org/future."
Among the proposals are initiatives to put CWA on the offensive, rather than on the defensive, in the face of relentless attacks on jobs and health and retirement benefits at the bargaining table.
"We need to take the fight to our employers all year round, every day, and not just dig foxholes for ourselves at contract time," said CWA President Larry Cohen.
Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach put it this way: "When I was elected vice president of District 4, I said I was tired of just fighting fires created by our employers. I wanted us to start lighting some fires ourselves. That's what this plan is all about — giving us the ability to drive our agenda all year round and put the employers back on their heels for a change."
Creation of a Strategic Industry Fund (SIF) is central to the goal of actively bringing positive change to our industries and workplaces and challenging the forces that threaten us and weaken our bargaining power (see page 6).
The proposal calls for maintaining and growing the Members' Relief Fund while channeling new contributions — above an established floor — into the SIF. The plan would make $20 million available the first year for large scale campaigns.
Among other points in the strategic plan, the Board is calling for recruiting and training a "Stewards Army" 50,000 strong, and also enlisting the power of tens of thousands of retired members as a combined force to take on industry-wide worker issue campaigns and mobilizations for such goals as health care reform.
Taken together, the 11-point program seeks to strengthen CWA programs on all three sides of the CWA Triangle — bargaining and workplace representation, organizing, and political action.
"We are convinced that, together, we can take charge of our own future and push CWA to the forefront in leading a resurgent labor movement," the Board said as it offered the report — "A Strategic Plan to Build Bargaining Power" — for review in early May.
Description of the Plan and Other Stories: