This Weekend When You Turn on the TV, Think About Comcast Workers

by James Parks, Mar 25, 2006

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, advertises its products as being “Comcastic,” a play on the word fantastic. But to workers at the nation’s largest cable company, “Comcastic” describes a low-road corporation that pays low wages and benefits, contracts-out services and fires union supporters.

Through a new website launched by the Communications Workers of America and the Electrical Workers, you can keep up with what Comcast is doing in your community and take action to help Comcast workers.

The Comcast Watch website shines the spotlight on Comcast’s anti-union and anti-consumer actions across the country. And there’s a lot to report. Here are just a few examples from the site:

• Comcast refused in February 2006 to sign a 13-year franchise agreement that took three years to negotiate because the Oakland (Calif.) City Council passed an ordinance requiring all companies with city franchises to agree to “non-confrontational and expeditious procedures by which their workers can register” whether or not they want to be represented by a union.
• Last month, Comcast fired Will Goodo, a longtime employee who is not represented by a union, after he testified before the Oakland City Council and at a Workers’ Rights Board hearing, also in Oakland, on Comcast’s violations of workers’ rights.
• The Comcast charter guarantees CEO Brian Roberts has one-third of the voting power of all Comcast shares even though he owns less than 3 percent of the total outstanding equity. (In 2003, Roberts and his father, Comcast founder Ralph Roberts, received $20.3 million in compensation and an additional $34.2 million in exercised stock options.) 
• Comcast’s cable rates are going up at double the rate of inflation.
• The Washington Post reports “Comcast appears to have positioned itself as a welfare agency for the well connected, currying favor with key officials for years by putting them and their relatives on the payroll.” 

Comcast has a long history of firing, harassing and discriminating against union-represented workers—a history detailed in a study, No Bargain: Comcast and the Future of Workers’ Rights in Telecommunications, by the worker advocacy and research group American Rights at Work. 

Comcast also was the focus of many demonstrations on Dec. 10, 2005, International Human Rights Day, when U.S. workers took part in rallies, teach-ins and other actions as part of a worldwide effort to support workers’ freedom to form unions.

Activists focused on the company’s strong anti-union stance. One participant in Pittsburgh, Ed Martin, is a Comcast worker who was fired after trying to form a union in Beaver Falls, Pa.  He says:

They change the rules to how it suits them. You’re just a number to them. We had managers tell us all the time, ‘If you don’t like it, there’s the door. Wal-Mart’s hiring.’

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