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Outsourcing Summit Spotlights 'Best Practices' to Save Jobs
CWA leaders in every industry are building upon practices that experience has shown do slow outsourcing and preserve jobs.
Recently, they came together in person at headquarters or conferenced in by telephone to share their experiences at the union's first "outsourcing summit," organized by the CWA Research Department.
"We must recognize that outsourcing not only decreases employment and diminishes the wages paid to our members in the United States, but that multinational companies exploit workers in the poorest nations by paying the least possible for their labor, CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen said. "Through good collective bargaining, organizing and legislation, we can keep jobs here at home, and by helping workers globally to form unions, we can raise their and our standard of living."
Bargaining Better Contracts
SBC was outsourcing DSL support work to India. But in the last round of SBC bargaining members mobilized around the issue of "hometown jobs."
"What I think was absolutely key, was making rank-and-file members understand the importance of fighting for this work and what it meant to them having it go overseas, and the second major thing was, posing it as 'hometown jobs,' that really resonated with the public," Jim Weitkamp, assistant to District 9 Vice President Tony Bixler, said.
In 2004 bargaining SBC agreed to bring all of the outsourced work back to the bargaining unit by the end of the
five-year contract.
Robert Santamoor, IUE-CWA GE Conference Board chairman, pointed out that GE not only sends tens of thousands of jobs overseas, but helps establish start-ups in local communities, then contracts work to the lower-paying, non-union firms. For instance, in the Schenectady, N.Y., area, where GE makes large turbines and generators, Environmental One employs 160 people. And in Latham, N.Y., Intramagnetic General Corp. employs 1,000 people to make industrial magnets.
That's why in bargaining, he said, "We try to make it expensive to outsource through the contract." For example, the union's GE contract requires a one-year notice of the company's intention to close down a plant.
Santamoor said the union also looks to preserve jobs by building products more efficiently and competitively. When GE was looking to shut down lighting production in the United States and outsource the work to Hungary and other nations, union leaders sat down with the company and looked for less expensive ways to do the work here.
"We made some commitments to the company in every lighting local through these job preservation meetings, and we saved that business," he said. "They're still making light bulbs in Ohio, and there are no plans to move them out."
NABET-CWA Vice President Jim Joyce said daily hires working on ABC Sports productions outsourced to ESPN "were getting hurt on the job and were actually suing because they didn't have the ability to file Workers' Comp claims."
The union has used this leverage in negotiations with ABC, and Joyce said he is hopeful an understanding with the company will soon be reached to bring all outsourced work back under the ABC master agreement.
At the Washington Post, TNG-CWA Local 32035 Vice President Darlene Meyer said, the company outsourced about 60 circulation call center jobs to a company in Wisconsin. The local mobilized and managed to negotiate a retirement incentive for many and a buyout plan for the rest.
Organizing the Outsourced
WashTech/CWA Local 37083 got its start organizing IT work that Microsoft outsourced in the 1990s. "About 50 percent of Microsoft's high-tech work in Redland, Wash., was done through temporary agencies," Local 37083 President Marcus Courtney said. "You'd work for years at a time. We didn't have any of the same benefits as full-time Microsoft employees, so we said, we need to form a union."
Now, WashTech provides news and reports about workers' rights, organizing, employment and legislation in Washington state on its website at www.washtech.org, and on a second website aimed at technology freelancers nationwide, www.techsunite.org.
WashTech has built an invaluable research tool. An "Offshore Tracker," also on its website, lists hundreds of thousands of jobs lost at hundreds of companies and, whether the jobs have gone overseas or to domestic locations.
For example, just in the "A"s: AT&T lost 139 customer service jobs in Fairhaven, Mass., on Nov. 17, 2004. Those jobs went to New Delhi, India. Scroll down to the "G"s: 250 customer service, data processing, finance and professional jobs vanished from undisclosed GE locations on Dec. 20, 2004 and turned up in Mexico. All kinds of employers are listed, from medical technology, to credit card companies, to computer manufacturing.
There Ought to Be a Law
District 1 CWA Representative Don Rice reported on New Jersey legislation to ban outsourcing of work done under state contract (see story, page 10), and Courtney said his local is pushing identical legislation in Washington State. CWA is actively promoting similar legislation in North and South Carolina, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Texas and Vermont. For information, visit www.cwa-legis-pol.org.
CWA members have also worked for right-to-know legislation, such as Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced in the last Congress, to require customer service representative to disclose their name and location. Though some state governors have issued right-to-know executive orders aimed at companies that do business with the state, so far legislation has not passed.
Winning Public Support
In bargaining, organizing or legislative activity to stave off outsourcing, community support is key. That's why CWA members have rallied at annual shareholder meetings of AT&T, IBM and other multinationals: to let shareholders and customers know that when work is outsourced, they're not getting what they paid for and it's stealing hometown jobs.
As District 9 CWA Representative John Dugan pointed out, companies are asking themselves: "What kind of work can we make routine and then ship off to a vendor?
"That could be to Indiana-or it could be to India," he said.
Recently, they came together in person at headquarters or conferenced in by telephone to share their experiences at the union's first "outsourcing summit," organized by the CWA Research Department.
"We must recognize that outsourcing not only decreases employment and diminishes the wages paid to our members in the United States, but that multinational companies exploit workers in the poorest nations by paying the least possible for their labor, CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen said. "Through good collective bargaining, organizing and legislation, we can keep jobs here at home, and by helping workers globally to form unions, we can raise their and our standard of living."
Bargaining Better Contracts
SBC was outsourcing DSL support work to India. But in the last round of SBC bargaining members mobilized around the issue of "hometown jobs."
"What I think was absolutely key, was making rank-and-file members understand the importance of fighting for this work and what it meant to them having it go overseas, and the second major thing was, posing it as 'hometown jobs,' that really resonated with the public," Jim Weitkamp, assistant to District 9 Vice President Tony Bixler, said.
In 2004 bargaining SBC agreed to bring all of the outsourced work back to the bargaining unit by the end of the
five-year contract.
Robert Santamoor, IUE-CWA GE Conference Board chairman, pointed out that GE not only sends tens of thousands of jobs overseas, but helps establish start-ups in local communities, then contracts work to the lower-paying, non-union firms. For instance, in the Schenectady, N.Y., area, where GE makes large turbines and generators, Environmental One employs 160 people. And in Latham, N.Y., Intramagnetic General Corp. employs 1,000 people to make industrial magnets.
That's why in bargaining, he said, "We try to make it expensive to outsource through the contract." For example, the union's GE contract requires a one-year notice of the company's intention to close down a plant.
Santamoor said the union also looks to preserve jobs by building products more efficiently and competitively. When GE was looking to shut down lighting production in the United States and outsource the work to Hungary and other nations, union leaders sat down with the company and looked for less expensive ways to do the work here.
"We made some commitments to the company in every lighting local through these job preservation meetings, and we saved that business," he said. "They're still making light bulbs in Ohio, and there are no plans to move them out."
NABET-CWA Vice President Jim Joyce said daily hires working on ABC Sports productions outsourced to ESPN "were getting hurt on the job and were actually suing because they didn't have the ability to file Workers' Comp claims."
The union has used this leverage in negotiations with ABC, and Joyce said he is hopeful an understanding with the company will soon be reached to bring all outsourced work back under the ABC master agreement.
At the Washington Post, TNG-CWA Local 32035 Vice President Darlene Meyer said, the company outsourced about 60 circulation call center jobs to a company in Wisconsin. The local mobilized and managed to negotiate a retirement incentive for many and a buyout plan for the rest.
Organizing the Outsourced
WashTech/CWA Local 37083 got its start organizing IT work that Microsoft outsourced in the 1990s. "About 50 percent of Microsoft's high-tech work in Redland, Wash., was done through temporary agencies," Local 37083 President Marcus Courtney said. "You'd work for years at a time. We didn't have any of the same benefits as full-time Microsoft employees, so we said, we need to form a union."
Now, WashTech provides news and reports about workers' rights, organizing, employment and legislation in Washington state on its website at www.washtech.org, and on a second website aimed at technology freelancers nationwide, www.techsunite.org.
WashTech has built an invaluable research tool. An "Offshore Tracker," also on its website, lists hundreds of thousands of jobs lost at hundreds of companies and, whether the jobs have gone overseas or to domestic locations.
For example, just in the "A"s: AT&T lost 139 customer service jobs in Fairhaven, Mass., on Nov. 17, 2004. Those jobs went to New Delhi, India. Scroll down to the "G"s: 250 customer service, data processing, finance and professional jobs vanished from undisclosed GE locations on Dec. 20, 2004 and turned up in Mexico. All kinds of employers are listed, from medical technology, to credit card companies, to computer manufacturing.
There Ought to Be a Law
District 1 CWA Representative Don Rice reported on New Jersey legislation to ban outsourcing of work done under state contract (see story, page 10), and Courtney said his local is pushing identical legislation in Washington State. CWA is actively promoting similar legislation in North and South Carolina, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Texas and Vermont. For information, visit www.cwa-legis-pol.org.
CWA members have also worked for right-to-know legislation, such as Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced in the last Congress, to require customer service representative to disclose their name and location. Though some state governors have issued right-to-know executive orders aimed at companies that do business with the state, so far legislation has not passed.
Winning Public Support
In bargaining, organizing or legislative activity to stave off outsourcing, community support is key. That's why CWA members have rallied at annual shareholder meetings of AT&T, IBM and other multinationals: to let shareholders and customers know that when work is outsourced, they're not getting what they paid for and it's stealing hometown jobs.
As District 9 CWA Representative John Dugan pointed out, companies are asking themselves: "What kind of work can we make routine and then ship off to a vendor?
"That could be to Indiana-or it could be to India," he said.