Telecom News: Securing Our Future in a Volatile Industry

CWA Telecom News is a new publication for our 300,000 members working in America’s most cutting edge and rapidly changing industry. You can expect to receive several issues of Telecom News each year in addition to the union’s main membership publication, CWA News.

You’ll find a broad range of stories covered in this first issue dealing with many employers and the various aspects of today’s telecom field — wired networks and wireless, basic telephone and emerging IP-based systems, traditional cable and the new FiOS and U-verse services.

This industry is all about change. Changing technologies, changing regulatory policies, corporate realignments and changing employer attitudes. In some cases, these changes present threats and challenges; in others we find opportunities for job growth and strengthening our bargaining power.

Two themes run through most of these stories — what’s happening to jobs and to workers’ rights and bargaining power.

There’s the potential for much job growth through building out the new digital telecom networks, as long as we make sure that those new jobs are union jobs. Stories in this issue describe how we are working to bring contracted jobs back and gain representation for new work at AT&T, and how Verizon’s FiOS is creating new job opportunities.

At the same time, CWA jobs are threatened as companies like Sprint, Alltel and Verizon seek to get rid of their rural phone operations to plow investments into more lucrative wireless and suburban and business high speed networks. Workers and customers alike are the victims if rural and inner-city areas are abandoned as a communications backwater.

That’s why our Speed Matters campaign is critical. Through legislation such as we supported in California, we can make sure that our telecom employers can compete on level terms with the anti-union cable industry, and also set requirements that they invest in building high speed networks beyond just the wealthy suburban neighborhoods.

Fighting for job opportunity also means protecting and strengthening our rights and bargaining power with these employers. Nowhere is this more urgent than at Verizon, which has a clear strategy to shrink the union ranks. Our response has to be to “Tear Down the Wall,” stop anti-union campaigning by management, and help non-union Verizon Business and Wireless workers win representation and join with us.

At the same time, we have to continue fighting union-busting at Comcast and the other cable giants and help these workers organize. Some of our most courageous members are those, such as Comcast workers in Pittsburgh, who have battled repeated decert attempts for years to keep their union and win contracts.

All of these issues are on the front burner for our 10 vice presidents who make up CWA’s Telecom Strategy Committee and who conference regularly to develop action programs. And now, with establishment of a Strategic Industry Fund at the last convention, we have an opportunity to mount sustained campaigns to secure our future in telecommunications.

We’d like to invite your comments on the new CWA Telecom News as well as suggestions for future stories. You can e-mail our editorial staff at cwanews@cwa-union.org.