T-Mobile Update

Outside the Deutsche Telekom annual meeting: from left, CWA District 7 VP Brenda Roberts, TU Member Joey Askew, and Lothar Schröder, ver.di leader and deputy chairman of the DT Supervisory Board.

Members of T-Mobile Workers United took a stand at the Deutsche Telekom annual meeting in Cologne, Germany, this week, speaking out against the company's refusal to respect workers' rights for T-Mobile US workers.

CWA District 7 Vice President Brenda Roberts, who leads CWA’s customer service work, and Joey Askew, a TU member and customer sales representative from Denver, joined members of the German union ver.di in leafleting shareholders as they arrived for the meeting.

Ver.di is the union that represents German telecom workers at T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom, and ver.di members have built a strong partnership with T-Mobile US workers who are fighting to get a union voice. 

Following the action, Roberts and Askew met with ver.di members at a T-Mobile retail store in Dusseldorf; Roberts also met with union workers at a Deutsche Telekom call center.

"It's been really instructive to be part of this delegation and to meet with our ver.di colleagues. Seeing how different the relationship between employers and employees is in Germany and how they cooperate at the workplace makes clear how critical good labor laws are for workers and why we must improve U.S. labor laws," Roberts said.

Inside the DT annual meeting, Kornelia Dubbel, a ver.di member and member of the T-Mobile supervisory board, reminded executives and shareholders that T-Mobile US has been found guilty of setting up an illegal labor organization, "a yellow union." She called on DT's CEO Timotheus Höttges to ensure that T-Mobile follows the law, as DT promised to do, and that it gets rid of its "yellow union."

Also at the annual meeting, the head of UNI Global Union’s Information and Communication Technology Services Sector called on DT to end its anti-union stance in the U.S. "Deutsche Telekom's internal guidelines are a good foundation for a profitable company which respects human and labour rights, but they are only of actual value if they are enforced all over the world," said Alke Boessiger. UNI has called on DT management to sign a global agreement to protect workers' rights across the company's global operations.