Working Together: If Not Now, When?

The Proposal to increase Executive Board diversity reflects the partnership we are building between national and local leaders through our Ready for the Future process. It calls for expanding ethnic and gender diversity while also adding the voices of local leaders to our Executive Board for the first time.

This proposal is part of Ready for the Future, adopted at last year's convention, which specifically called for changes that would address Executive Board diversity. RFF calls for other Board restructuring by 2011. We've received some comments that diversity can wait until then, that we need to do everything at once. However, change is a continuing process. Diversity is before us now as, step by step, we move forward.

We've recognized for years that our Executive Board doesn't reflect the diverse makeup of CWA's membership. Now is the time to address that issue directly — and to do so in a way that honors our democratic traditions and makes our national leadership even more responsive to members' needs.

We're justly proud of CWA's reputation as a progressive leader of our labor movement. But frankly, when it comes to diversity at the highest elected leadership level, we're lagging rather than leading.

While our structure of district and sector vice presidents has served us well in most respects, this system has not adequately promoted diversity, particularly when it comes to minorities. That simply is unlikely to change without our taking specific action. The fact is that minorities average about 15 percent of the membership in most districts and sectors, which statistically puts people of color at a disadvantage in getting elected to Board positions. This is not a math game, but our Board has never had more than one minority member — far less than the percentage of our members who identify themselves as minorities.

CWA is one of only a few unions without local leaders on its Executive Board. Under the Diversity Proposal, the four elected at-large diversity members would have a full voice and vote on the Board but would not be Vice Presidents. The cost to the union for wages, travel and expenses for all four would total less than $25,000 a year — a small price for increasing Board diversity in a significant way and bringing CWA into the mainstream of our movement.

Unions have been taking steps to broaden the makeup of their boards in response to the AFL-CIO's resolution on diversity adopted in 2005. While noting that the labor movement was a close partner of the civil rights and women's movements and was instrumental in passing the landmark Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act in the early '60s, the resolution states:

"Despite decades of progress, the union movement acknowledges we have not met our goals: that unions must reflect the diversity of our communities and union movement leadership must reflect the diversity of our members. In too many cases, women and people of color still are underrepresented among union leadership."

There are many reasons why CWA needs to take this step, from both a moral and practical standpoint.

An important one is that many of the unorganized workers seeking to unionize today are women and members of minority groups, and often they are younger. When we reach out to these workers, they can see that our leadership doesn't look like them. As a result they are less likely to feel welcome in CWA than perhaps in some other unions.

We firmly believe that leadership diversity makes us stronger, more effective, more powerful. The greater the range of backgrounds and experiences, including those of local leaders and activists, the wiser we will be as a leadership team — the more responsive we will be in serving our members.

CWA has long been committed to shattering glass ceilings wherever they exist. We have been in the forefront of fighting for equality and advancing rights, visibility and opportunities for women and minorities in our workplaces and in every element of American society. We can't be less vigilant and demanding when it comes to our own organization.

The Diversity Proposal to the 2007 Convention is the product of months of hard work and a dialogue across the union at all levels by a committee composed of Board members and members of the CWA Committee on Equity and National Women's Committee, and chaired by Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling.

Many ideas were considered and debated — and indeed, details of such a plan to increase diversity could be debated endlessly. But our Executive Board believes this proposal is the best step to achieve the goals we set forth in Ready for Future for greater inclusion in our decision-making processes.

As a labor union, inclusion and diversity are what we are all about. This is the right thing to do, the smart thing to do. And the time to do it is now.

—  Larry Cohen, Barbara Easterling, Jeff Rechenbach