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‘The Whole World Is Watching’ German Telecom Strike |
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More than 70 workers spent their lunch hour sending a message to one of the world’s biggest telecom companies and the German government: injustice to German workers is an injustice to all of us. The workers marched in the hot Washington, D.C., summer sun at the German Embassy in support of striking workers at the German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom (DT).
Members of the German union Ver.di went on strike at DT on May 11 in a series of rolling walkouts. The union says that DT has lost 350,000 employee-days since the strike began. DT’s management announced in October that it will transfer 20 percent of its global workforce (some 50,000 workers) to a new service unit called T-Service. Among other things, the company wants to cut these workers’ pay by 9 percent and increase their work hours from 34 to 38 hours per week.
Labour Start reports the company is planning to make a revised offer to workers that would include a one-time payment for each worker in 2011 if financial and customer-service goals are met in 2010. Blomberg News reports the union’s wage council will meet tomorrow to discuss Deutsche Telekom’s revised offer and determine whether to resume negotiations. The offer doesn’t “facilitate the search for a solution” because workers are effectively asked to save for their own bonus through wage cuts, Ver.di negotiator Lothar Schroeder told Focus magazine in an article published today.
The union borke off negotiations last month. The company has said it will implement the transfer of personnel by July 1 with or without the union’s approval. The German government, the largest shareholder with 32 percent, has refused to intervene.
Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen led the marchers in a chant addressed to the German government: “The whole world is watching.” Cohen then went on to say:
The German government is a union buster. We’re united with workers around the world to make a difference in this struggle in Germany. We will be in this fight one day longer than DT and the German government.
If this can happen in Germany where 75 percent of the workers have collective bargaining coverage, what does it mean for us?
DT also owns the multinational mobile phone company T-Mobile, which is viciously anti-union here in the United States and elsewhere. CWA members have said they believe that DT management is attempting to “import” T-Mobile’s American-style, anti-union tactics to Germany.
“DT holds no loyalty to any group of workers,” Ken Zinn of the AFL-CIO Organizing Department told the marchers.
We will stand with our German brothers and sisters to resist the global race to the bottom.
Another player in this union-busting effort is the equity investment firm Blackstone Group, which owns 4.5 percent of DT and is the second largest shareholder. Cohen, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Phillip Jennings, general secretary of UNI-Telecom, a global trade union federation, all have written to Blackstone’s CEO Steven Schwarzman, urging him to help settle the dispute fairly. But Schwarzman, a major supporter of the Republican Party and President Bush, has not responded.
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Under Bush, working people are in danger of loosing the federal jobs. I believe Bush preferes outsourcing other than federal work force. As a matter of fact, the plan is to make federal governement much smaller.