Remarks from Secretary-Treasurer Rechenbach

Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Rechenbach at the 2011 Telecommunications & Technologies Leadership Conference in Jacksonville, Florida - March 7, 2011.

Thank you Ralph & Jimmy.  It is a privilege for me to be here this afternoon.  The C&T Meeting was the first opportunity I ever had as an officer of this Union to speak outside of my own home District.  As Vice President of District 4 I was invited by newly appointed Vice President Ralph Maly at the urging of last night’s featured speaker Bob Richart to come and speak to a C&T Meeting in Palm Springs California many years ago.  I can remember how nervous I was that day and how welcome you all made me feel then.  I thank you for that warm welcome back then and again today. 

Ralph asked me the other day if I had any good jokes for today, and I told him I didn’t then on the way over here yesterday I heard that Rush Limbaugh had been going after Michelle Obama.  Rush called the First Lady a hypocrite, criticizing her for eating RIBS on vacation and said she isn't following her own dietary guidelines.

Really Rush?!? He would eat his OWN ribs if you put enough sauce on them.

I was pleased to hear Annie talk about the April 4^th Day of Action which she and Larry announced on the Unionwide Conference Call last week.  Pleased for a couple of reasons, first and foremost because it is, in my opinion, one of the first steps in moving our country back to recognizing the value of work in our nation. 

But for me on a more personal note, it also takes me back to the very beginning of my appreciation of the labor movement. As a teenage boy growing up in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, I already had stirrings of a social consciousness.  So I remember vividly, my Mother, on her birthday, coming to my room and telling me Dr. King had been shot and killed.   In the ensuing days I followed the story and some of the ensuing outrage and anguish that surfaced in the wake of his murder.  I heard a replay of his haunting last speech, where he foretold his own death, saying he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the promised land. And while he prophesied that he may not get there with us. He wanted us to know that night, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

And it was then that I found out he was there to support striking sanitation workers, because he recognized the best way to insure respect, dignity and civil rights on the job was through a Union contract.

I’ll talk a little bit more about that later, but for now let me give you an update on the state of CWA.  It of course comes as no surprise to you that we have been losing members at an alarming pace. 

The economy which has devastated all Americans, has had a particularly brutal impact on our Union. 

Everyone in this room in particular has experienced membership loss over the past two years.  In fact, throughout CWA we have over 66,000 fewer members now than we did 24 months ago.  No local has been immune, whether through office closing, plant shutdowns, early retirements, or election losses as in Northwest Airlines; we have all seen too many members leave our ranks.

In January, the Department of Labor released a chilling statistic; in 2010 less than 7% of the private sector workforce was represented by a union, 6.9% to be exact.  That is the lowest percentage in over 100 years, lower even than the dark days before passage of the Wagner Act.

Of course, this has forced all of us to do more with less.   Here in CWA I am in the beginning stages of putting together a budget that projects $95 million in revenue for the fiscal year ahead, that amount is down from a revenue projection of $125 million as recently as 2008. 

Moving forward with that kind of decline won’t be pleasant, and it certainly isn’t where we would like to be, but it is the hand we have been dealt so let’s play it.

And playing it will mean playing it smart.  We need more than ever to make the best uses of our diminishing resources.  Force the companies we deal with to pay more of the costs of prosecuting the mistakes and injustices they are responsible for.

Internally these financial concerns cause us to look even deeper at our own structure.  To your credit and the credit of your Vice Presidents Ralph Maly and Jimmy Gurganus, you have been helping to lead the way in working out new efficiencies.  Their willingness to combine offices and resources has paved the road for several other structural changes in our Union.  These two have been true leaders when it comes to making sure that we use our limited resources wisely.

Another area we need to address and those of you in many of our Right to Work for Less States have already been working hard at this, is the non members we have in our midst.  Having a non member in a workplace is more than just an issue of having a freeloader on our backs, it diminishes our bargaining power as well.  Every single employer knows how many strikebreakers he or she can count on by just tallying up the non members in a workgroup.  District 6 has led the way in taking this problem head on, over 4,000 non members have become new dues paying CWA members over the past year because of their work.  

And I view the lack of another unionized wireless carrier the same way that I do our internal non-member issue.  The fact that neither Verizon Wireless nor T-Mobile has a union contract for their workers, clearly diminishes our ability to get our AT&T Mobility members a better deal.  We desperately need to break down the corporate built walls around the workers at Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint and any other wireless carrier if we ever hope to have different outcomes at AT&T Mobility.

So this crisis has caused to inspect everything we do as a Union.  As most of you know I do not plan on being a candidate for Secretary Treasurer at this year’s convention in Las Vegas. 

In January I celebrated 30 years of working fulltime for CWA, and in June I will celebrate 40 years as a dues paying CWA member.  And I have enjoyed every minute of it, well most minutes of it anyway. 

I have lived in Washington for almost 6 years now spending weekends going back and forth to Cleveland.  I am ready to go back to Ohio where my wife and most of my family still live. 

But as we should with every change within CWA we need to look at this as an opportunity. 

Driven by the model demonstrated by Jimmy Gurganus, I have proposed, with the support of President Cohen and Executive Vice President Hill that we take the moment to examine whether or not having three executive officers is integral to the functioning of our Union.  The CWA Executive Board has voted to support the idea of eliminating the position of Executive Vice President.  I have personally encouraged EVP Hill to run instead for the position of Secretary Treasurer.  She knows first hand the challenges we have and is the best person I know to take on that task. 

One of the reasons I can feel good about leaving at this point is knowing our Union is in the hands of dedicated and capable leaders like Larry and Annie.  They understand the complex challenges we face and bring a vision and drive to the task of solving those problems and building our Union.  

But let me talk for a few moments about why I think this can work and why it would be good for us. 

First off, most national unions function quite well with two top officers, so I am convinced we can as well.  This fits with the desire of the convention in our Ready for the Future initiative to “right size” the Board. 

The current duties of the Executive Vice President can be reassigned to the remaining officers and with the assistance of key staff continue to carry out those functions.  Finally it is cost effective.  By eliminating one of those positions we can save nearly half a million dollars in salaries and expenses. 

Don’t get me wrong, the EVP doesn’t make half a million dollars, but when you take in consideration additional positions associated with the office the savings over time will rise to more than half a million in annual costs. 

Of course this action will need approval by the Convention, and I hope all of you will give it serious consideration as we think about how do we best, in an environment of declining membership and correspondingly declining revenue, how do we best take advantage of the resources we do have? 

We need to do all we can to make certain CWA has as much of our dues revenue as possible on the front lines of the fight to build our movement. 

On behalf of a cash strapped and grateful Union I thank you for what you have already done and encourage you to continue your efforts to be the best possible stewards of our member’s dues money.

And clearly in the months ahead we will need every resource we can possibly muster to try and stop the corporate takeover of America. 

Today in our nation we are faced with a right wing echo chamber that dominates the public discussion, made up of ultra conservative pundits and TeaBaggers and financed by incredibly wealthy interests.  They are an interesting collection of people who first got all worked up about health care reform, that frankly wasn’t the reform many of us had hoped for.

But I don’t recall them, or most people for that matter, getting mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed the President.

They didn’t get mad when we allowed the energy industry to dictate energy policy or the drug industry to determine Medicare benefits.

They didn’t get mad when we invaded Iraq looking for WMDs that didn’t exist and spent a trillion dollars and counting on it. 

They didn’t get mad when 10 billion dollars in cash disappeared in Iraq.

They didn’t get mad when they saw the horrible conditions our wounded veterans were receiving at Walter Reed when they returned from the Middle East.

They didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

They didn’t get mad when we let New Orleans drown.

They didn’t get mad when we gave tax cuts to the wealthiest of all Americans wiping out a surplus and piling up a trillion dollar deficit in the process. 

They didn’t get mad when Wall Street and bankers paid themselves multi billion dollar bonuses as a reward for wrecking our economy.  In fact, they defended them saying, “a contract is a contract, and it would be un-American to breach.”

Really?!?  I guess a contract is only a contract when it involves the wealthy elite in our nation. 

Frankly, we in the labor movement need some of their energy, some of their passion, but passion that needs to be directed at the corporatization of America.  It is something we had when our parents and grandparents built this movement, and it is something we will need to inspire if we are to turn this nation around.

As we see labor lose ground in membership and power, we see a growing disdain for the movement rising.  People stop imagining what a union might do for them, and begin despising what it has been doing for others. 

Lately, across the country, but especially back in my home district in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, as well as New Jersey where over 60,000 city, county and state workers proudly carry a CWA card, an Missouri and right here in Florida much of this anger has been directed at public employees with politicians in some cases from both parties bemoaning the cost to the taxpayer.  Ignoring completely some key facts, not the least of which is the value public employees bring to our society. 

Imagine for a moment a society without laws, no police protection, or firefighters, schools only an option for the children of parents who can afford it, highways and sewers built with public funds a thing of the past.   Well that’s the America too many of the tax cutters envision for us. 

It was Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels who called public unions "the privileged elite" during a speech in Ohio.

There’s a privileged elite alright, but it ain’t the person plowing snow, cleaning our sewers, protecting our homes, teaching our kids to read, making sure we have fresh safe water to drink, or running into burning buildings.  Who are they?

Well they are people like Ohio Governor John Kasich.  I am ashamed to admit that my home state elected this pig as our Governor. 

In 2001, Kasich took a job as managing director of the Columbus investment banking division of Lehman Brothers. He remained at the company until its collapse in September 2008. During 2008, Lehman Brothers paid Kasich $587,175 in salary, bonuses, and other benefits. Over $400,000 of that bonus is credited to Kasich using his political connections to facilitate investment of $480 million from the state pension fund with Lehman Brothers. That money was lost to the state.  Yes, the same state pension fund that he now claims is helping to bankrupt the state. 

And the privileged elite are people like top hedge fund manager John Paulson who in 2010 -- after our tax dollars bailed out Wall Street -- earns $2.4 million…..AN HOUR!  And because of a tax loophole that has still not been closed, pays taxes at a 15% rate  . . . far below the rate of taxation paid by you or I or those firefighters, nurses, and teachers in Ohio.  

In fact, the top 25 hedge fund managers made $25 billion last year . . . that is the equivalent to the cost of 658,000 teachers who teach 13 million students. 

Yet, these Governors are calling the teachers a “privileged elite”?  Personally, I think that 658,000 teachers bring a lot more value to our country than 25 hedge fund managers.

And if that isn’t bad enough, I would like to make a point by getting a volunteer.  Can I get someone down in front here?  Great!  Can you take out your wallet and show everyone how much cash you have in your wallet right now?

$ 10 and how about change, how much change do you have?  So what is special about that amount?  It is $ 10 more than Bank of America, GE, Exxon-Mobil and Citibank combined to pay in income tax last year. 

We can be better than that as a society, we can recognize, as the prayer I used to recite before every local union meeting and Judy Dennis recited part of it earlier, “an injury to one is the concern of all, and the concern of all is the welfare of everyone.”

I can promise you in retirement I will continue the fight, but I will miss opportunities like this to come down and visit with so many of the friends I have made over the years. 

So let me close this afternoon by going back to where I started this all at with April 4^th and our day of action.  A couple years ago I dug a little deeper into the story of Dr King’s assassination and the sanitation workers strike in Memphis.  It had roots on a cold February morning back in 1968.  A heavy rain was falling and two garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee who had been denied the right to join a union, were going out on their first morning run.  Echol Cole and Robert Walker were black and so they weren’t allowed to ride in the cab of the truck, to keep out of the rain like most of the black garbage workers in Memphis they rode in the drum in the back, that huge, smelly, gaping mouth that ate all of the city’s garbage. They were huddled down and surrounded by odors of every kind imaginable, and probably many we can’t imagine. 

Somehow, and it was probably an accident, the ram was activated, in literally in a matter of seconds the two men were crushed to death.  Not a single city official attended their funeral, and their families were given a months pay and a check for $500. 

So that’s what the strike that pulled Dr King to Memphis was about.  It wasn’t higher wages, a better health care plan or even more vacation, it was about dignity and respect.  And isn’t that, after all, what pulled each of us in this room to this calling?  Isn’t that what drives us year in and year out to give up our personal time, time with our families, time with our loved ones, to try and make just a little difference in the lives of our coworkers, many of whom we will never know, and most of whom who will never know of the sacrifice you and others like you all across this union have made. 

I thank you for that work, for your dedication, for your sacrifice, and for your love of our Union.

Thank you for including me in your session today and I look forward to seeing you all again in Las Vegas.