News

  • Poor People's Campaign Gets Boost from CWA Activists
    CWA human rights activists who attended the Poor People's Campaign: Moral Action Congress in June are working hard within their communities to engage CWAers in the fight for social and economic justice! CWA members Kwami Barnes (Local 4603 in Wisconsin) and Fred Smith (Local 3902 in Alabama) joined the Poor People's Campaign Coordinating Committee in their respective states to partner with local activists on organizing human rights actions in their communities. Those state committees recently kicked off a 22-state "We Must Do M.O.R.E. Tour!" running from September to May 2020. M.O.R.E. stands for mobilizing, organizing, registering, and educating people who will join the movement and vote to advance a moral agenda that challenges injustice. The tour will lead into the Mass Poor People's Assembly and Moral March on Washington, where thousands of activists, leaders, and moral agents will gather on June 20, 2020, to demonstrate their power and solidarity. For information on the tour and events near you visit www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/more. CWA members Kwami Barnes (Local 4603 in Wisconsin), left, and Fred Smith (Local 3902 in Alabama), right, joined the Poor People's Campaign Coordinating Committee in their respective states to partner with local activists on organizing human rights actions in their communities. — Sep 12
  • Remembering Morty Bahr
    CWA will be celebrating the life and legacy of President Emeritus Morty Bahr, who passed away in July, at an event in Washington, D.C., on October 23. For more information and to RSVP, please visit www.cwa-union.org/bahr. President Bahr had a passion for education and lifelong learning. In 2001, the Morton Bahr Distance Learning Scholarship was established in his honor at SUNY Empire State College to help adult workers with full-time jobs pursue college studies. His family has requested that those wishing to honor his memory make donations to: Morton Bahr Distance Learning ScholarshipSUNY Empire State CollegeTwo Union AvenueSaratoga Springs, NY 12866https://www.esc.edu/distance-learning/why-online/bahr-scholarship — Sep 12
  • AT&T Must Reject Elliott Management’s Outdated Corporate Raider Strategy that Destroys Jobs and Long-Term Value
    Washington, D.C. -- This week, Elliott Management announced its plan to extract profits from AT&T by eliminating jobs and sending work to low-wage contractors, further enriching its billionaire founder and CEO Paul Singer. Adoption of these proposals will harm AT&T’s workers, customers and long-term investors, and the Communications Workers of America is firmly opposed to this strategy. CWA represents over 100,000 working people at AT&T. AT&T’s great strength has been its dedicated, highly-skilled workforce. That workforce is also the foundation for its future. Instead of allowing Elliott to raid the company’s assets, AT&T should invest in its core business by delivering high-speed internet, video and wireless service to all Americans and invest in its workforce through improved training and retention programs. “Elliott Management has taken the obsession with shareholder value to an extreme, pushing proposals that in the end benefit only a small subset of shareholders - themselves,” said CWA President Chris Shelton. “Anyone who thinks that Paul Singer and Elliott Management intend to ‘deliver far-reaching benefits’ to AT&T’s customers is not familiar with the destruction this vulture hedge fund leaves in its wake. Working people are putting the vultures on notice. We will no longer feed your greed.” This playbook is all too familiar. Vulture hedge funds like Elliott Management seek to boost a company’s share price by cutting costs, and then take profits before the long-term consequences set in. One of Elliott’s key proposals is to ramp up share buybacks, a clear indication that wealthy investors are the intended beneficiaries of this plan. For decades, American corporations have put increasing shareholder value above all other goals for their companies. The consequences have been devastating for working families in the United States, as income inequality has skyrocketed and investment in our communities has plummeted. Working people are fighting back through increased strike activity and support for candidates who pledge to reign in corporate excess. The corporate CEOs who are members of the Business Roundtable have even begun to reassess their priorities. Instead of returning to the outdated, disproven value extraction model that Elliott is advocating, AT&T should use its existing strengths to pioneer a new model -- a partnership with its employees and customers that measures success not by satisfying the whims of Wall Street but by increasing the opportunity for prosperity for all Americans. ### — Sep 11
  • Organizing Update
    The Arizona Republic The Arizona Republic Guild's logo was designed by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Steve Benson, who was laid off from the paper in January. Employees at The Arizona Republic announced Wednesday that they are taking steps to form a union with NewsGuild-CWA to have a seat at the table as a major corporate merger looms, and are requesting voluntary recognition. On the eve of the employees' announcement, management unleashed a campaign of intimidation and harassment, calling known union supporters into the Human Resources office individually and questioning them about their activities. The HR director seized the work phone of reporter Rebekah Sanders, effectively preventing her from performing her job. The interrogations followed the release of a newsroom-wide email from the executive editor on Friday comparing union supporters to mob bosses and child molesters. "As a consumer protection reporter, I fight on behalf of readers when businesses treat them badly. Now, I am fighting on behalf of my coworkers," Sanders said. "I believe the future of local journalism depends on all of us standing up to protect our newspapers." The announcement comes amid talks that Gannett, the Republic's corporate owner, will merge with GateHouse Media in a $1.4 billion deal, creating one of the largest news conglomerates in the U.S. The companies say they plan to make $300 million in cuts, including more than $100 million to newspaper operations. Gannett has already slashed the Republic by about 70% from roughly 425 journalists in 2008 to about 130 today. ### Memnon Archiving Services Thirty-five employees at Memnon Archiving Services, a digitizer of analog media in Bloomington, Ind., have won representation through an NLRB election held last Wednesday to join CWA Local 4818. — Sep 5
  • CWAers Build Global Solidarity to Lift Working Conditions for Everyone
    A group of CWA call center workers visited the Philippines last week to investigate corporate offshoring practices, expose rampant workers' rights violations in the Philippines by call center outsourcing giant Alorica, and to build global solidarity between workers. As AT&T and other companies have cut thousands of U.S. customer service jobs, they continue to offshore work and rely on overseas contractors like Alorica. The delegation, led by CWA District 7 Vice President and chair of CWA's Customer Service program Brenda Roberts, met with leaders from the Unified Employees of Alorica (UEA) in Manila in a show of solidarity, and shared their experiences with each other, finding similarities between the ways the companies exploit the workers in the U.S. and in the Philippines. The CWA workers heard about how Filipino workers who participate in union activity are subject to physical threats and severe intimidation. AT&T, which is a major client of Alorica, has done nothing to address the severe union-busting and other rights violations in the Philippines. Vice President Roberts said the one-on-one conversations with the Filipino workers were energizing. "I'm blown away by the courage of these workers who risk being arrested and put in jail, and yet they know that if we stick together that we are going to make progress and things will change," Roberts said. "We have the same struggles, but if we stand together and fight through the struggles together, we all win," said CWA Local 6215 steward Kendra Williams, a fraud analyst at an AT&T call center who has worked for the company for 18 years. "We all have the common goal of fighting against corporate greed. Raising their wages is going to raise ours." "AT&T is preying on workers here. They're getting paid less than $2 an hour and don't have basic rights," said Natalie Santiago, Executive Vice President of CWA Local 3122 in Miami. "If AT&T and Alorica would respect workers' rights, wages here would go up and AT&T would have to stop slashing U.S. jobs." The visit took place during the AT&T Southeast unfair labor practice strike, and Alorica workers showed their solidarity with U.S. workers by pledging to monitor calls in case the company attempted to send calls that would have been handled by striking workers to their centers. "AT&T workers across the globe face many of the same issues, which is why we are in this fight together," said Sarah Prestoza, President of the Unified Employees of Alorica. The CWA delegation also attended the Uni Global Union conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They participated in discussions about how to face the challenges of technological change and learned about organizing victories around the world. The conference featured a video spotlighting Teleperformance workers in the Dominican Republic who won union representation with help from CWA, and telecom workers from 66 countries expressed their support for striking AT&T Southeast workers. Above: CWA District 7 Vice President and chair of CWA's Customer Service program Brenda Roberts (third from right) led a delegation of CWA members who work at AT&T to Manila to learn more about conditions at AT&T contractor Alorica. They met with Unified Employees of Alorica President Sarah Prestoza (center) and Alorica workers and discussed their shared concerns and ways they could work together to fight corporate greed.Below: Members of the BPO Industry Employees' Network (BIEN), a network of business process outsourcing employees in the Philippines that is allied with the Unified Employees of Alorica, showed their support for CWA members who were on strike at AT&T Southeast. — Sep 5