In My Opinion: A Global Union Strategy for the New Economy

Two CWA members who work at Sprint soon will visit Germany to discuss management abuses in organizing and concessionary bargaining demands by that company with rank and file, shop stewards and leaders of our German counterpart union, the DPG.

What's the connection, you might ask? Well, German phone giant Deutsche Telekom may be considering increasing its 10 percent stake in Sprint and could very well end up with a controlling interest. Representatives of the DPG sit on the board of Deutsche Telekom, and they have long been concerned about Sprint's labor policies and worker rights abuses.

The invitation to send the Sprint workers to Germany came after I addressed DPG's 50th anniversary convention recently and also participated in a forum on telecom multinationals.

The German unionists were appalled to learn that Sprint's CEO earns the equivalent of $2.7 million per week, counting stock options, and yet is demanding substantial concessions right now in talks with CWA. And they remember that Sprint a few years ago engaged in a brutal campaign of intimidation and even shut down a telemarketing office to avoid the spread of unionization into its long distance operation.

Historically, there has been a greater respect for workers' rights in Europe than in the United States, however European unions have had to fight to preserve labor standards in recent years - just as we have - with the pressures of global competition, technological change and corporate restructuring.

In Germany, the DPG wants to make sure Sprint-style anti-unionism doesn't become a contagion. Our two unions are committed to working together to make sure that high-road labor relations prevail over the model of the Sprints and MCIs as globalization of the industry unfolds.

CWA and European unions already have shown that together we can impact multibillion dollar deals when the public interest is endangered. When the MCI-WorldCom merger threatened to create a stranglehold on the Internet, our joint efforts were key to forcing the sale of MCI's Internet backbone before the deal could be approved by the European Commission. Such an Internet monopoly would have severely handicapped the unionized telecom companies that employ our members on both continents.

It was exactly 10 years ago in a bitter, three-month strike against NYNEX to preserve health benefits, that we demonstrated very concretely the value of international union ties. Our union allies in the United Kingdom and other nations put strong pressure on NYNEX operations in Europe, and our Japanese counterpart union offered a large low-interest loan which ensured that we could sustain the strike as long as necessary. These efforts contributed greatly to winning that pivotal strike.

Since then, CWA has created formal alliances or established close ties with counterpart unions in Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa and is forging similar bonds elsewhere. Together with these other unions, we are determined that wherever in the world our employers invest and form new ventures, they will have to bargain with a union and provide decent standards and a living wage for their workers.

With today's corporate consolidation and expansion, we're seeing not just an emerging global telecom industry but a global information industry. For example, consider that Microsoft is quietly buying huge stakes in overseas cable companies, potentially putting Microsoft into information delivery as well as content. In response, unions in all the converging information sectors around the world are establishing closer ties.

This month, unions in communications, media and technology fields worldwide are taking a bold step with the merger of four international labor secretariats, including our own Communications International for telecom and postal workers, into one organization representing 15 million workers in 800 unions.

The new Union Network International (UNI) will combine groups representing media, information technology, graphic arts, office professional and white collar workers along with CWA and the other telecom and postal unions. UNI will give us the means to track and share information and deal strategically with the giant information-based corporations as they span industrial and geographic borders.

This is part of our strategy for the new century, recognizing that CWA members are in the vanguard of a worldwide economic restructuring. We must change with the times in order to fulfill our mission, which has never changed - improving the lives of our members and fighting for social justice.