In My Opinion: Old Economy, New Economy, Similar Issues

Two stories involving CWA organizing drives made headlines in major newspapers and news magazines around the nation recently. Both are unfolding on the West Coast, however they represent struggles in contrasting — “old” and “new” — areas of the economy.

The first time dot-com workers ever have filed for an NLRB election came on Nov. 27 when service representatives at Etown.com of San Jose, Calif. petitioned to unionize with help from two Newspaper Guild-CWA locals.

Their struggle got even wider attention by being coupled with the announcement that 400 reps at the high-profile Amazon.com also are trying to organize, in this case with assistance from CWA’s WashTech affiliate in Seattle.

Around the same time, right before Thanksgiving in fact, a group of Latino jewelry manufacturing workers in Los Angeles won a court injunction to block their employer, Quadrtech, from shutting down the plant and moving to Mexico in retaliation for their vote to unionize with CWA’s new merger partner, IUE.

It wasn’t the employer’s brutal and illegal actions that made news — it was the fact that this was the first time a judge had ever stepped in to block a plant shutdown pending NLRB investigations of labor law violations by the employer.

This was a landmark ruling — but one that shouldn’t be unique in such cases. There is no more cruel example of the saying, “justice delayed is justice denied,” than when workers succeed in proving their employer a blatant lawbreaker, but never have a chance to get their jobs back.

CWA fought a similar, well-publicized case five years ago that also involved abuse of Latino workers — this time at a Sprint telemarketing office in San Francisco. Sprint shut the office one week before the workers would have voted — there was no doubt — to unionize. CWA’s motion for a preliminary injunction to keep the office open was denied. And so, there were no jobs to go back to when subsequent court rulings documented Sprint’s illegal campaign to crush the organizing drive.

At Quadrtech, management had threatened during the organizing drive to shut the plant if the workers voted for the union — one of several clear labor law violations that union and NLRB lawyers will be citing in this case.

Plant closing threats, the ultimate form of management intimidation, actually are common, and growing more so. According to recent study by Cornell University professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, in more than half the union drives between 1998 and 1990, employers threatened to shut down if the union prevailed. Union win rates drop by 13 percent when those threats are made, according to the study.

Meanwhile, back in the “new economy,” it turns out things aren’t much different. The Etown.com workers are battling old-fashioned union-busting tactics in the form of threats and outright firing of campaign leaders who handed out union authorization cards. The Guild-CWA has filed with the NLRB to win reinstatement of 17 fired union supporters.

Just as management’s opposition to unions, and willingness to break the law to retain absolute control over their workforce, remain common to both traditional and high-tech industries, the reasons workers strive to organize haven’t changed either.

Even though the Quadrtech workers earn little more than minimum wage, their main impetus for organizing centered not so much on pay as on abusive conditions, and the lack of fairness and respect, of a voice in the workplace.

The workers, mostly women who assemble earrings in a stifling factory, generally are on their feet for 10 hours a day. When a supervisor refused to give an injured woman a chair, and then management retaliated against other workers who protested, that’s when they sought help to form a union.

In Seattle and Silicon Valley, while those workers have far less brutal conditions than the women at Quadrtech, they also are facing the frustration of powerlessness. Service reps are discovering that the new-economy promise of a “partnership” between management and employees is a myth. At Etown.com, the workers are tired of erratic schedules that interfere with home life, and of broken promises over pay raises and other issues.

Amazon.com workers complain of exhaustion from excessive overtime, regular 50-hour weeks rising to 70 hours during peak periods. And having seen 150 workers laid off after the last Christmas season while 100 customer service jobs were contracted to India, they are increasingly conscerned about job security.

While Amazon says, “everyone is an owner” by virtue of stock options, “Our ownership feels hollow,” one rep told The New York Times, because management doesn’t listen.

Whether it’s battling outright sweatshop conditions — still a fact of life in the 21st century — or fighting for a stake in the promise of the information revolution, it’s pretty clear that labor unions are just as relevant today as they ever were.