Victories for CWA Members Add to Doubling of Worker Organizing

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released data this week showing that worker organizing and NLRB-elections have doubled since the start of the Biden-Harris administration, reversing a decades-long decline. President Biden and Vice President Harris have made it clear that union representation helps build a better future, and workers have responded.

CWAers have been at the forefront of a national movement of workers coming together to exercise their rights at work and organize for a better future. Workers at banks, advanced manufacturing plants, college campuses, television stations, technology and video game studies, telecom companies, news rooms, nonprofits, airlines, transportation and logistics, and many more have all organized their workplaces and joined CWA as part of more than 3,000 union elections in the past year.

The chronic underfunding of the NLRB has left workers with inadequate protections in their fight to build the American middle class, however. Despite thousands of union elections in the past year, the NLRB has just half of the field office staff it did 20 years ago. This short-staffing leads to justice delayed and justice denied for working people.

CWA members at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette waited five years and one day from filing unfair labor practice charges against their employer until the day an overburdened and underfunded NLRB filed an injunction against the Post-Gazette to enforce the law. While waiting for justice, CWA members bravely sacrificed to carry on the fight on their own, leveraging the power of the strike and maintaining their picket lines for two years and counting.

Every American worker deserves swift justice that can only be served by a fully funded and staffed NLRB.