Working Together: Building an Even Greater Union Force for the Future

Jeff Rechenbach
CWA Executive Vice President

In a survey of CWA local presidents about our Ready for the Future process, a response that I see over and over is, "This is long overdue." Our leaders at every level clearly "get it."

Here is what CWA and the rest of working America, both organized and unorganized, face today.

We see some of the richest corporations eliminating defined benefit pensions and slashing health benefits wherever they can. For example, one of our largest employers, Verizon, recently froze pensions and cut health care for tens of thousands of management and unrepresented workers. What a chilling signal that sends.

We see other corporations like US Airways and United Airlines taking advantage of bankruptcy laws to shed their pension and retiree health care obligations. Now Delphi is seeking dramatic wage and benefit cuts from IUE-CWA members and others through the bankruptcy route.

While the corporate world systematically compounds our national health care crisis by cutting benefits and shifting costs to families, we have a government with no interest in tackling the issue of growing tens of millions without medical coverage.

And as defined benefit pensions go by the wayside, we have a White House that even wants to kick away another pillar of retirement security by radically changing Social Security from a guaranteed social insurance program to a risky Wall Street-based scheme.

Meanwhile, throughout both private and public sectors — from GE to Sprint to the state of Texas — we see a frenzy to outsource good jobs, moving them either offshore or to contractors that provide marginal pay and benefits.

It is not a coincidence in the face of these developments that private sector unionization is at an all time low — 8 percent today, down from 35 percent in 1948. Public sector unionization is at 37 percent, which may not sound bad until you realize that in most industrial countries it is double that, 75 percent in Canada, for example.

Ready for the Future is about increasing our bargaining power, which means organizing unorganized areas of our existing employers and industries as well as mobilizing our members and increasing our political clout.

Verizon is a good example of why that's necessary. Having kept its rapidly growing wireless business union-free through a vicious campaign of worker intimidation, and now in the process of buying up non-union MCI, Verizon says it needs to drop its benefit standards down to the level of those non-union entities.

We can point to positive achievements, such as organizing and winning contracts for 38,000 Cingular workers. However, we have the challenge of organizing the rest of the surging wireless industry, as well as players like Comcast and Time Warner in the basically non-union cable industry, which is now mounting head-to-head competition in bundled telecom services. Another positive example comes in New Mexico — showing the linkage of political, organizing and bargaining programs — where CWA organized and won contracts for over 3,000 state workers after union-supported Gov. Bill Richardson won election and restored public sector bargaining rights.

Mergers and consolidation throughout the converging media fields — broadcasting, newspapers, entertainment and telecom — offer similar challenges to maintain and build our bargaining power. And we have the same challenge in other sectors, such as manufacturing and airlines.

Unless we can build bargaining power, which is directly linked to the percent of unionization of our employers and industries as well as political clout, we will continue to fight to just hold on instead of moving forward.

Ready for the Future means gathering our best ideas, our most successful programs and initiatives, and crafting a strategic plan that builds power for each side of the CWA Triangle — bargaining/representation, political/community action, and organizing.

We need to link these areas as we make plans at both the national level and the local level, where our frontline officers, stewards and activists can make a huge impact in energizing CWA and driving our programs for change.

A key focus of Ready for the Future lies in identifying CWA's strengths, what we do well in all of these areas, and then building upon these best practices.

To help promote local union and membership discussion of new ideas and strategies, this issue of the CWA News highlights local unions that indeed are doing things well — developing their stewards structures, finding innovative ways to communicate with members and activists, strengthening their locals through mergers, building political clout through state councils, creating fulltime organizing programs, taking the lead in revitalizing our crucial labor councils, and bringing active and retired members together for the fights that affect all of us.

Speaking for President Cohen and Secretary-Treasurer Easterling as well as myself, we are inspired by these examples, and we are excited about Ready for the Future and how, by working together at all levels, we can transform our union into an even greater force for our members and our movement.