New England Locals Get Jump on Free Choice Campaign

With the ink barely dry on campaign materials for labor's Employee Free Choice Act postcard campaign, a New England local submitted cards from 30 percent of its members — and its president says he's going to make it 100 percent.                                                                                                                         

Local 1301 President George Alcott said his own members' struggle with their yellow-page employer, Idearc, and the economic downturn affecting working families everywhere, illustrate exactly why the Employee Free Choice Act is so important.

"Look what this company is doing to us, and we have a union," Alcott said. "It's a disgrace what they can get away with. Think what would happen if we didn't have a union at all. Unions give us strength in numbers and we need to increase that strength."

The labor movement is calling the campaign the Million Member Mobilization, with the goal of gathering 1 million postcards from workers urging passage of the Employee Free Choice Act in early 2009. The postcards and snapshots of people who signed them will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol after the November election.

CWA has pledged to get 80,000 cards, about 15 percent of its membership. That's all Alcott needed to know to get the ball rolling. "We got the e-mail saying CWA was going to be undertaking this, so I clicked on, got the form and printed it out," Alcott said. "It happened that we were about to have a membership meeting and everyone there signed the cards."

Members of Local 1302 and CWA retirees also signed. The Boston-area members are among 700 CWA and IBEW members in New England and New York who have been working at Idearc without a contract since last June. The company declared a bargaining impasse — illegally, CWA has charged — and rolled back benefits, job security and sales commission plans. Unfair labor practice charges are pending. Read more about the workers' struggle at ga.cwa-union.org/idearc.

(To sign up for Million Member Mobilization, go to www.freechoicecwa.org)