Remarks of President Larry Cohen – As Prepared for Delivery
Monday, April 22, 2013
Pittsburgh, PA
As Prepared for Delivery –
Seventy-five years ago, the National Federation of Telephone Workers formed after its predecessor was ruled a company union by the newly constituted National Labor Relations Board.
Ten years later, several organizations, including the Telephone Workers Organizing Committee and other independent unions united to form CWA; joining IUE, NABET, and The Newspaper Guild in the CIO. Others among us, such as AFA and the Printing Sector, then the ITU, were part of the AFL.
At that time, most of our public sector members were in states that did not even recognize public sector unions, as many still do not today, including Texas, Mississippi, West Virginia, Virginia, and Oklahoma.
So we are, and always have been, a union formed from many sources and traditions.
We value the power we create when mobilized. We value the power we’ve built as we organize our industries. We’re willing to explore new ideas, as we seek new strategies.
This was true when our families’ standard of living were rising through the 1970s and continues in the painful period since then.
The triple threat of Founding President Joe Beirne became the CWA triangle of representation, organizing and political action with President Morty Bahr.
Morty is well, but missing us and his first convention since 1954. He continues to help lead the Elderly Housing Development Corporation.
Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus Barbara Easterling continues to lead the Alliance of Retired Americans.
With us is former EVP, Secretary-Treasurer, and District 4 Vice President Jeff Rechenbach (stands), who played a crucial role in the successful re-election of Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.
As we begin I salute you, the leaders of our union, the delegates to this convention, the members of our bargaining committees, the staff of our union and the members of our executive board. In our history of 75 years (or whatever point before or after that marks the origins of your local), our survival has never been harder. These are difficult times but you are confronting the challenges that face us, not shrinking from them or sugarcoating them.
Ask our delegates from Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan just how hard it is resisting the attacks from state government on our bargaining rights.
Ask our CenturyLink delegates from District 7 working through the acquisition of Qwest after US West, and now, 8 months battling for their first contract with their new owner.
Ask our Verizon members in the East, striking for two weeks - not for a contract at that time, but to force the company off the worst set of concessionary demands in our telecom history. Then another year of bargaining and mobilizing and reaching an Agreement that maintained our standard of living, with huge help from all of CWA and our allies.
Ask our AT&T members across the country, working past contract expiration with constant mobilization, and even walk-outs.
Or NABET-CWA members at ABC working two years past expiration, now in ratification on a tentative agreement that will prevent imposed conditions.
Ask our US Airways flight attendants who, after bargaining for seven years just reached a new agreement, and now are battling to survive as their company is merged to become the New American Airlines.
Ask our New Jersey public workers in the 4th year with Chris Christie, the first of the right wing governors, who stripped all health care bargaining rights and now our members face $4,000 a year premiums for family health care.
Or New York Times journalists engaging in unprecedented job actions to secure an agreement.
Or our manufacturing members in IUE-CWA, faced now with the worst trade agreement ever, the Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP, despite a democratic White House.
Or ask those without any bargaining rights who are struggling to join CWA to even have the ability to negotiate with their employer.
Is all this too much to bear, too negative, is it hopeless, not just hard?
No.
The latest issue of the CWA News has a centerfold of highlights of the past two years. It’s in your packets.
Check out the list. Yes, it’s hard but every sector, division and district had successes. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s not hopeless.
Hard yes, hopeless no.
Witness organizing gains at AFA-CWA and we welcome here 9,300 flight attendants from United-Continental. We will hear much more about organizing on all fronts tomorrow.
Hard yes, hopeless no. We ratified contracts for over 100,000 at AT&T, 38,000 at Verizon, 10,000 at GE, 750 nurses at Mercy hospital and 750 journalists at Bloomberg’s Bureau of National Affairs.
Hard yes. Hopeless no. Movement building and creative mobilization like “Reimagine CBC” led by the Canadian Media Guild, young activists and community leaders, literally reinventing the mission of their main employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Hard yes, hopeless no. Look at the coalition work in Stand Up for Ohio, led by District 4 partnering with the Center for Community Change and the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and continuing the amazing work of Seth Rosen, linking our members with those in community organizations in a unified strategy.
Or the “No Knives on Planes” campaign by flight attendants fighting for their safety and our safety when we fly.
Hard yes, but not hopeless. In these highlights, we have nearly 100 positive examples involving the majority of our members in some way and I’m sure there are more.
Hard, not hopeless.
Central to our success is our bargaining power.
If we define our fight as solely against our union employers, the non-union employers in virtually all of our sectors and industries get a free ride.
And the non-union employers are growing stronger in every industry where we work. Unfettered, they drive down working conditions and pay. There is no check or counterbalance. And in turn, that undermines what we can achieve.
That is why we have focused on organizing and organizing rights as part of our collective bargaining strategy.
We know if we only focus on the union employers, because we can, because we have the right to bargain; and we fail to focus on the non-union employers or fail to focus on the anti-union political environment or fail to recognize that there are limits to what union employers will agree to in negotiations, we are not confronting our reality and we will not succeed.
This doesn’t mean we don’t fight for the best deal possible. But as we know, bargaining is about making a difference and it is rarely about justice.
Bargaining takes place as employers increase their profits by holding down our wages and benefits. Bargaining takes place in an environment of comparisons to the non-union industry and the global economy.
Balancing our aspirations for a better contract with the reality of dominant non-union industries presents the greatest challenge in our 75 years.
Our bargaining committee members have become heroes. When elected, no one knows how long they will be there – except one day longer than our employers’ resistance. As I said, every district, division, and sector faces tough, prolonged, almost impossible bargaining challenges.
Will every delegate who has served as a bargaining committee member in the past two years please stand and be recognized.
I’d like all Staff who have worked with these committees to stand.
And now will the members of this Executive Board who’ve worked day and night supporting these committees and staff to win the best possible contracts for our members, please stand as well.
Join me in recognizing all of them.
These are hard times. But in hard times, times of resistance, we learn what makes a difference. And what does not. We learn how to create hope. We learn who our true brothers and sisters are.
We learn about solidarity, caring, and love. And it is our solidarity and love for each other which will carry us through this dark period in our history.
No group in our union, and perhaps anywhere, better captures the spirit of resistance than Local 1109 and the 300 Brooklyn Cablevision technicians who battled to form their union and win an NLRB election. And now for over a year, they’ve been bargaining for their first contract.
After a year of negotiations getting nowhere, 22 highly mobilized technicians decided to utilize Cablevision’s open door policy by going to their manager and asking to meet.
Instead of meeting, management told them they considered them on strike and were therefore, fired and permanently replaced.
Local 1109 and District 1 mobilized all of NYC with inspiring rallies and support from nearly every elected official and, eventually, all 22 were rehired.
But the fight for that first contract goes on and they are here today to ask for your support, not just for themselves, but for all workers like them, in our union, in other unions, and for workers with no union at all.
Welcome Jerome Thompson, Paul McDaniel and Shatoya Thomas, and listen to the beat.
The spirit and energy of Jerome, Paul, Shatoya and the support of Local 1109 and CWA District 1 are the best in America. But in today’s bargaining and political climate, it takes this kind of Herculean effort and enormous bravery to form a union. It shouldn’t and it wasn’t always that way. But today we find that the path to organizing that built our union is blocked.
The most important factors that influence our own bargaining possibilities are the percentage organized in the industry and the number in the nation that are covered by collective bargaining.
Ours is the lowest in the developed world and that is why retiree health care and pensions in the US are disappearing, but not in Germany or Brazil and many others. In those nations, real wages after inflation are also rising while in the United States, they are falling.
Amazingly, Brazilian bank workers are union and earn more today than US bank workers. And the Brazilian bank workers’ union has allocated $300,000 to help us organize bank workers here.
Our traditional answer to building power in our industries –organizing the unorganized—grows harder and harder because of fierce employer opposition.
So we devised a strategy to engage in political action to change organizing rights, which would increase our bargaining power and improve our bargaining.
Here too, we have run into roadblocks set up by corporate America and their anti-union allies.
Remember, in 2008 President Obama ran on the program of enacting the Employee Free Choice Act designed to level the organizing playing field. We passed that bill overwhelmingly in the House, but in the Senate, despite having majority support, it was not debated for a second because Senate rules require a super majority of 60 votes to even debate a bill.
For two years, I’ve been frequently asked, why are you speaking out on Senate rules when we need to focus on our bargaining to maintain our health care or fight for better pay?
My answer—if we do not change the Senate rules, we will never get the health care legislation we need. And health care at the bargaining table will continue to be only about givebacks, since non-union employers are dumping health care in droves.
If we don’t change the Senate rules we will never improve the laws governing organizing and bargaining rights.
Even worse, if we do not change the Senate rules the president’s five nominees to the NLRB will not be confirmed and that means unfair practice charges from our bargaining will mean nothing.
The failure to confirm all five members of the NLRB means that there will not be a democratic majority on the NLRB and that no new NLRB organizing rules will be adopted.
And we won’t accept that. This is why CWA is leading the labor movement to force Senate Democrats to take a stand and confirm the full five members of the National Labor Relations Board and we won’t settle for two Democrats and two Republicans.
And with your leadership and action back home, we will.
In addition to undemocratic Senate Rules, there are other blocks to our democracy that prevent our political work from advancing our bargaining agenda.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were people and money was speech. This is a total perversion of democracy .
More than $7 billion was spent in the federal election of 2012. And that’s an increase of $1 billion since 2008.
The super wealthy and their corporate allies are buying the ability to block our legislative agenda that would improve our bargaining status and organizing rights.
The US Chamber of Commerce, over the past 25 years, has taken full control of the Republican party’s economic agenda and, sadly, with the donations of the 1 percent, they now heavily influence the program of the Democrats.
Getting big money out of politics is one of the four key parts of our Democracy Initiative. The Democracy Initiative is led by CWA, the Sierra Club, the NAACP and Greenpeace. More than 50 other key labor, environmental, faith and women’s organizations have joined with us.
We must stop the pollution of our electoral system by big money.
The power of the 1 percent grew further when their political allies systematically began to purge voter registration rolls, making it more difficult for the poor, the young, and the elderly to vote. This is voter suppression. It’s undemocratic and we must stop it as well.
These are three of the four cornerstones of our democracy movement: change the Senate rules; get big money out of politics; and win universal voter registration so all citizens can vote.
Money out, voters in. Money out, voters in.
Even for those among us solely focused on collective bargaining, we need to eliminate those blocks in order to make progress. If we don’t fix these democracy blocks, our bargaining will never go forward.
Let’s turn to page 11 in the booklets on your table—“Building a Movement for Democracy and Economic Justice.” This graphic shows the link between the democracy issues and the economic issues we have focused on for 8 years. Let me repeat its core message: We cannot achieve our economic goals — not in our bargaining and not in our political action — unless we fix our democracy. Everyone knows the dice are loaded. Everyone knows the rules are fixed.
At this convention, we will look at ways to strengthen CWA and also help shape the world around us.
We should not think that we can fix our bargaining solely by perfecting CWA.
As we debate the internal structural change we will make as a union, let’s do so with respect.
We sometimes tear each other down, when to succeed, we must lift each other up.
Whether you adopt the Executive Board proposal on telecom bargaining or not, bargaining will be brutal and we may often disagree.
It is simple to shout, “We need to fight harder or bargain longer or even strike.”
It is simple to say, “With better leaders we would have had better contracts.” But we must evaluate our bargaining results in terms of what others around us are achieving. We bargain in an America with falling wages, health care losses and the elimination of pensions.
We can coordinate better, and we have, whether everyone agrees or not. But as I said to Ron Gettelfinger, UAW president during the near collapse of the auto industry in 2009, “Ron, your negotiations are much harder than what Walter Reuther faced. Reuther was leading a growing labor movement with increasing political power and millions of workers with a history of standing up and fighting back.”
Improving our lives through collective bargaining remains our primary purpose.
We’ve discussed the importance of organizing the unorganized in order to improve our bargaining power and how the failures of our democracy have blocked this strategy.
So what is our path? How do we work with others who support collective bargaining? How will we fight for economic justice and democracy?
There are two key elements of our strategy today: First, we must act different politically, and second, we must build a movement of 50 million.
More concretely, in terms of political action, we cannot continue to do the same thing and expect different results.
It looks more and more as though we need a new progressive Tea Party, not just more Democrats.
If we just keep choosing candidates based on who is the better or who is the lesser of two evils, things are likely to keep getting worse. If the “better” candidates vote against working families, how much should their election matter?
We’re not an ATM that Democratic politicians use to fund their campaigns while making empty promises and then, after the election, fail to vote for our issues.
We need to seek out primaries to challenge candidates who aren’t on our program; candidates who stand with us and for change.
Second is building a movement of 50 million.
Why do we call the third side of the triangle movement building and not simply community and political action as our founders described it?
Seventy-five years ago when CWA was formed, there was a clear path to expand bargaining rights through political change and union growth. The third side of our triangle was about union citizenship in the New Deal and new democracy.
Today, that path is blocked. So we must return to our progressive roots and build a new movement that will create a new path to achieve positive change.
How do we get 50 million people in motion … united in building a movement? It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. It’s likely a 10 year effort because the challenges we face are monumental, but they are not impossible.
This is where the choices each of you make and what you do matter. Let’s go back to where we started today and remember the highlights of the last two years.
On the left pages throughout the booklet, “Building a Movement for Economic Justice and Democracy”, are your own examples of move
ment building in your Locals and your communities. You’re taking action to the streets, as well as through electoral and political work.
Your work in workplaces, in your Local, and in your community will drive this movement.
Check out our movement builders’ website and tell us how you are taking up the challenge. I urge you to write your own story and post it at www.cwavoices.org —so we can share and be inspired by our stories and organizing in new ways.
Last week, the US Senate began to consider a new immigration policy that includes a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants.
Our democracy work includes support for a path to citizenship, not just because it is a critical human rights issue, but also because those 11 million new citizens will be our voters.
We need to support changes that will help secure our economic future just as much as immigrants need our support now to achieve a path to citizenship.
Please join me in welcoming Daniel Rivera from Local 7019 in Phoenix, Arizona and hearing his family’s brave story of their march to citizenship.
While thankfully most of our families did not travel here under conditions as difficult as Daniel’s, most of us who are here are the descendants of immigrants who made that trip aspiring for a better life. Unless our families were forced here as slaves or indentured servants, or we are Native Americans, our immigration story is one of seeking the American dream.
Most of our stories are like my own—families that came here before this nation had any immigration laws. Nearly everyone who came here by ship across the Atlantic or crossed the Rio Grande before the 1920s was legal, and within five years had an easy path to citizenship.
That’s worth repeating: Nearly everyone who came here by ship across the Atlantic or crossed the Rio Grande before the 1920s was legal, and within five years had an easy path to citizenship.
In order to restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe, quotas were established in the 1920s and then more quotas came after that.
The right wing talk machine, paid for by Corporate America and conservative billionaires, pits us against each other on this issue, just as they have for years in order to prevent economic change and economic justice.
But now the American dream is at stake for all of us and our children, as well as for new immigrants.
If we stay divided based on immigration status, or race, or faith, we have no chance to build this movement of 50 million.
We must commit to movement building, as hard as that is, and we must recognize that there are years of work to get back to where we were. It’s hard, but it’s not hopeless.
This is our strategy that we must implement throughout the union. It is a path we will take together.
We are not losing sight of our key bargaining issues – fair pay, health care, and retirement security – but let’s be clear, without this link to a broad movement, we will fail.
Many of our members may not currently see this as an appropriate strategy, and we need to engage them in this dialogue and make the case that our standard of living, and the lives of our children will not improve unless we build this broader democracy movement.
In order to sustain our contracts, we need the movement to change organizing rights so we can build power in our industries. There can be no progress without this struggle.
The Defense Fund Oversight Committee Report and many of the resolutions that you will consider commit us to this path of movement building.
The Defense Fund Oversight Committee is proposing to dedicate part of the investment income from our Members’ Relief Fund to fund our movement building work.
We will couple those funds with the Strategic Industry Funds that have enabled our locals and our union to play a major role in fighting for our economic agenda, as well as transforming our industries, whether it’s Canadian Broadcasting, lean manufacturing, speed matters in telecom, fighting the destruction of the public sector, or saving journalism.
Some may say this is too big a reach for our members.
But this Executive Board and so many of you are saying, “If not now, when?”
If we don’t build a much deeper movement now, when?
If we don’t fight for universal voter registration and against voter suppression now, when?
If we don’t demand that Democrats confirm an NLRB with a democratic majority that will make decisions that support us now, When?
If we don’t stand up for retiree health care, not just in our own union but across the nation, now, When?
This is our time to take up this challenge.
If not now, when?
As usual, today and tomorrow you will be debating critical issues with total respect for all viewpoints.
But let’s send a clear and strong message that we are standing up and fighting back.
Let’s send a message that we will continue to stand for change inside our union, as well as outside.
Our members should hear the message of Pittsburgh, loud and clear—What do we do when we are under attack?
We Stand UP! We Fight Back!