In My Opinion: Thoughts on a Great CWA Union Builder

CWA has been blessed with leadership stability. Remarkably, we have only had three presidents over a long history. All three of us knew each other and worked together as our careers overlapped. Each took the top post at a pivotal time for CWA.

I want to take the opportunity to share my thoughts on Glenn Watts, CWA’s second president who we lost recently (see CWA Mourns Loss of Glenn Watts), and to put some of our history in perspective for newer CWA members — how we got to be the union we are today.

Glenn Watts could hardly have been more different in personality from his predecessor, our founding leader Joseph A. Beirne. Beirne was feisty and aggressive, a New Jersey native. He could get in your face. Watts was a North Carolinian with a courtly southern manner — soft spoken and professorial. But both were tough, smart and effective leaders.

Beirne was right for his times, for pulling us up by the bootstraps and building a union that could stand up to the mighty AT&T Bell System. We consider him our founder because, with dogged determination, he led what was a loose federation of regional telephone unions, formed in 1939, to become a true national union.

The first national telephone strike ever, in 1947, had mixed results that taught our early leaders two things: We needed a strong, disciplined national organization, and we needed to bring AT&T to one table for national bargaining, rather than negotiating separately with some 30 entities of its far-flung Bell Telephone System.

Decades of hard pattern-style bargaining, including some tough strikes, finally did bring AT&T to heel. By January 1974, Joe Beirne was dying of cancer but he climbed from his sickbed to announce to our Bell System bargaining council that AT&T at last had agreed to bargain systemwide on behalf of over a half-million CWA members that summer. But because of his illness, it would be his colleague and protégé, Glenn Watts, who would step up and bring our members the fruits of what Joe had led us to achieve. Joe died that Labor Day.

Glenn Watts came up through the ranks starting out as a union steward in the mid-1940s while working as a telephone installer in Washington, D.C.

He went on to win election as District 2 vice president in 1952 and four years later Beirne tapped him as an assistant. Glenn later became executive vice president in 1965 and then secretary-treasurer in 1969.

His 11-year era as president was CWA’s bargaining “golden age,” distinguished by four rounds of record-setting Bell System contracts that built up a tremendous foundation of wage and benefit standards that CWA members enjoy today throughout the entire telecom industry. More than that, these contracts were pace-setters for the entire labor movement with breakthroughs in such areas as maternity and family care benefits, reducing job stress, and addressing technological change and wage inequities between men and women.

Glenn was committed to advancing opportunities for women and minorities within CWA’s leadership ranks and he proposed creation of CWA’s rank-and-file Equity and Women’s Committees early in his presidency.

He also cared deeply about human rights all over the world, and he led CWA to campaign to free Soviet dissidents, support President Jimmy Carter’s Middle East peace initiative, and carry forward Beirne’s programs to aid Latin American workers in organizing.

Toward the end of Glenn’s tenure, CWA was becoming a different union from when he took the reins, and massive upheaval was on the horizon. AT&T and the Justice Dept. agreed to an anti-trust settlement in 1982 to divest the company of its local Bell companies, with the breakup to take effect two years later.

When Glenn became president in 1974, the only non-telephone members were the telegraph workers in my own bargaining unit and a few public workers in New York and New Jersey. By the early 1980s we were reaching out to organize in other fields and our public sector membership had soared to 60,000 by 1983, when we established an executive board position to represent them.

Glenn had the vision to foresee the telecom industry shakeup, and in 1981 he called for creation of a unique CWA Committee on the Future to try to predict sweeping changes to come in communications and in society. At a special convention two years later, the committee was right on the mark in many areas, such as pointing to the need for CWA to continue to organize new areas and to merge with other unions in order to have the size and clout to be effective.

When Glenn stepped down in 1985, CWA was at another big turning point. The union had capitalized on our early struggles and victories with substantial contract gains. We now had to brace for a whole new world of global competition and turmoil. Glenn had done his part to help point the way for a new leadership team and a new CWA era.

Glenn Watts earned what I consider the greatest epitaph that can be bestowed on any man or woman: the lives of countless thousands of people are so much better because of his own lifetime of accomplishment.