Working Together: Our Stragtegic Focus: Good Union Jobs

Larry Cohen
CWA President

Fighting for good jobs — this month's CWA News theme — is all about one of the major goals underlying our Ready for the Future strategic plan, along with strengthening health care, retirement security and workers' rights.

And because of the actions by our convention delegates last month, CWA should be in a much stronger position to wage that fight (see stories on the convention, page 3 and page 4). 

Future programs of our new Strategic Industry Fund will be focused on union jobs and also creating more job opportunities through sustained campaigns with major employers and industries.

Recruiting and training an army of 50,000 stewards and mobilizers, building our political clout at every level, and enlisting tens of thousands of CWA retired members will add muscle to these critical campaigns.

Our convention was the culmination of a process of self-review and democratic debate over the past year — and the convention itself was also different.  There were no outside speakers — we generated our own energy.  We focused on key challenges facing our members, our union and our movement.  And we left with a plan to build our bargaining power and responsibility for our own future.

The attack on good, family-sustaining union jobs is one we see in every CWA sector and industry, and indeed across the entire labor movement.  There is hardly a job today that can't be outsourced in one form or another.

Most people think of shipping jobs overseas when they hear the term outsourcing.  But when firms shed their core business functions and contract the work to the lowest bidder, that's outsourcing, and it doesn't matter whether the work goes down the street or across the globe.  The result is the same — a race to the bottom as wages, benefits, workers' rights and job conditions decline for millions of Americans.

Our focus is on the increasingly widespread practice that results in the hollowing out of our economy.  As companies contract away their core jobs, getting rid of skilled career employees, many become little more than a brand and a marketing department.

In the service sector, some employers see that they lose touch with their customers through outsourcing.  At AT&T and US Airways, we have negotiated agreements to bring some work back. 

However, too many management executives are less concerned about quality and service to customers, let alone any sense of responsibility for the impact of their actions on American communities and families.  Stories in this special report lay out the whole range of job threats that come under the umbrella of outsourcing.

Sending jobs offshore continues to be the biggest threat to members in our IUE-CWA Industrial Division.  But now even journalists, along with high tech and customer service workers, are seeing their work shift to India and other nations.  Domestic outsourcing to non-union firms paying low wages and offering few if any benefits is rampant in telecom and other industries and in the public sector as well, under the emblem of privatization.

The attack on union jobs, and on worker bargaining rights,  also comes through reclassifying jobs as supervisory or "management" positions to remove them from bargaining units.  We report here on the University of California, but this is also a fight with the Bush administration and the National Labor Relations Board, which is primed to deny union eligibility to registered nurses in a decision that could impact as many as 8 million workers in a variety of industries (see page 10).

And we see a reverse form of offshore outsourcing where the jobs stay here but the workers are imported from abroad through temporary H1-B visas, where the employers, not the immigrants, get the visas.  CWA's WashTech affiliate can cite many examples of IT workers who were forced to train their foreign replacements, who typically earn half as much, before being dumped.

You'll see in this report that we have some success stories that should inspire us, examples of CWA locals being enterprising and tenacious in stemming the outflow of work and even bringing good jobs back to our members.  We need to build on these examples and ramp up the fight as we go forward.