Resolution #80A-25-02
Ten-year Project to Unionize Our Fellow Telecommunications Workers
Together, we in the Communications Workers of America should take up the historic task to unionize our fellow frontline workers in telecommunications, regardless of technology or employer. This task is difficult; a decade would be a good start. Some campaigns will hit walls of union-busting, but even losses can be opportunities to learn and improve our plan to win.
We face a very different industry than our union did 50 years ago. Corporate greed has destroyed our jobs. The telecom industry was 60% union in 1980 with a single dominant employer, the regulated monopoly of the Bell System; now less than 15% union with mostly unregulated employers. A few huge corporations still capture most of the profits, with the top five internet service providers controlling more than 80 percent of broadband subscribers.
In 2021 CWA delegates approved a resolution to organize at the convergence of the Tech-Media-Telecom super-sector also known as the Information Industry. We have organized nearly 10,000 tech workers and 3,500 media workers since that resolution and have developed powerful, creative strategies to break through in a previously non-union sector.
Yet we continue to see dramatic losses in our telecom membership. Our employers are shedding jobs by the tens of thousands. The anti-union cable companies have busted so many unions there are only a handful of organized units left. Only one of the big three wireless carriers is union. But there is also cause for hope. We have organized over 2,500 telecom workers in Windstream, Frontier, AT&T, Verizon, TDS, Mobi Wireless and more in the last five years.
Telecommunications workers founded our union and we have a duty to organize our industry of origin. We can and must organize tens of thousands of telecommunications workers and regain leverage over our industry.
Resolved: We will promote a grounded understanding of the industry, as it is now, through mass education at every level of our union;
Resolved: We will commit significant, long-term financial resources to organizing the industry;
Resolved: We will organize new groups of telecom workers wherever possible by applying past organizing lessons, following the CWA Organizing Model, and developing new approaches; and
Resolved: We will build our national capacity towards increased leverage in the long term through campaigns to organize key workers, pressuring key employers, sectoral bargaining strategies, coordinated organizing and bargaining, and the re-regulation of telecommunications providers.