CWA, TWU Form New Partnership
The Transport Workers (TWU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) have voted to work together in a new partnership. The two unions represent more than 120,000 airline workers and are joining forces to support bargaining and organizing at American Airlines and campaigns at other airlines.
In New York and Philadelphia, TWU members have been a big part of the fair contract fight by CWA and Electrical Workers (IBEW) members at Verizon and Verizon Wireless. In the Midwest, where TWU represents transit workers and CWA represents university and public workers, there’s a lot of common ground.
TWU President James C. Little says the two unions share “common values and principles that should intuitively benefit our members through working together.” CWA President Larry Cohen says partnerships like this “are the only way we will make progress for workers.”
More than 1,500 Workers Join AFL-CIO Unions
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Warehouse workers, school, bus drivers, teachers, mechanics, telecommunication and manufacturing worker all have recently won a voice at work with AFL-CIO unions.
More than 350 employees at IKEA Distribution Center in Perryville, Md., voted by an overwhelming margin to join the Machinists (IAM ) despite opposition from IKEA managers who hired Jackson-Lewis, the well-known union-busting law firm. District 4 Business Representative Joe Flanders says the workers, “were able to see through the scare tactics.”
Last year, the Danville, Va.-based employees at Swedwood, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IKEA, voted to join the IAM.
In DuPont, Wash., more than some 350 workers who repair military helicopters and do site maintenance site maintenance and repair work for defense contractor URS Corp. Wash., voted to join IAM District Lodge 751. The workers have been without a pay or cost of living increase for more than four years, says new IAM member John Davis, and “a bunch of people got fed up.”
In Avon, Ky., 219 workers (see photo) at Allsource Global Management at the Bluegrass Station base voted to join the IAM. They are material coordinators for the distribution of military equipment. Read the rest of this entry »
282 Cablevision Workers Join CWA
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Yesterday, 282 Cablevision technicians and dispatchers in Brooklyn voted to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1109 in a union election administered by the National Labor Relations Board, overcoming a vigorous anti-union campaign led by Cablevision. They are the first Cablevision workers to join a union. Cable TV is an overwhelmingly nonunion industry while the traditional telecommunications industry remains highly unionized.
“I’ve waited 13 years for this,” said Cablevision technician Clarence Adams. “United, as members of Communications Workers of America, we now have the power to negotiate a fair contract that will give us the dignity and respect on the job we deserve.”
Cablevision workers are currently subject to arbitrary discipline and favoritism by managers, their health care coverage is inadequate, their workload is unreasonable and they have insufficient 401(k) retirement plans. Cablevision workers also make at least one-third less than Verizon workers, who are represented by CWA.
The Cablevision 99% Votes Today
Today, 285 Brooklyn-based Cablevision workers—the Cablevision 99%—will vote in a election for union representation.
According to the New York State AFL-CIO,
the workers have withstood a blistering assault on their right to form a union. Rather than coming to the table and discussing the merits of union representation in the open, Cablevision management is truly taking the low road, by pressuring workers with misinformation in endless “captive audience meetings.”
Despite this enormous pressure from the management 1 percent, the Cablevision 99% have been standing strong.
Check out the workers’ powerful video here. Then follow the directions on the action page to e-mail Cablevision management and let them know their workers have the right to organize free from harassment and intimidation.
According to their website, Read the rest of this entry »
Take the Speed Matters Test
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The Communications Workers of America (CWA) Speed Matters campaign will soon release its annual report on Internet speeds across the country to help paint a clear picture of U.S. Internet speeds and identify the areas that need immediate improvement.
You can help by clicking here to take the Speed Matters test to find out just how fast your Internet speed is. Previous reports have found that the United States lags far behind other industrialized nations when it comes to Internet speeds.
Why does Internet speed matter?
Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s Parent, Fails to Live Up to Its Claims on Labor Rights
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Teresa Casertano in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department’s Global Campaigns section sends us this report.
T-Mobile USA workers were not surprised to learn that a recent report by the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the OECD revealed that T-Mobile owner, Deutsche Telekom, had failed to meet its own claims about corporate social responsibility. Under the corporate social responsibility reporting standards set by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Deutsche Telekom gives itself an A+ rating, yet it provides little evidence to justify granting itself such superior marks.
The TUAC report details the company’s failure to report on global standards and finds that Deutsche Telekom highlighted its practices in its home country of Germany while failing to disclose its labor and human rights record in its non-German operations. The company claims 14 core labor and human rights indicators are “covered completely” in its GRI Report, while a fifteenth is “covered partly.” In fact, the TUAC report shows that only two are covered completely, seven are covered partly, and six are not covered at all. The TUAC report also finds that Deutsche Telekom disproportionately focuses its employee reporting on management employees while making little reference to its policies for tens of thousands of non-management employees. According to the report, only one of Deutsche Telekom’s 17 reported sustainability “Key Performance Indicators” relates to workers at all.
Unions Fight Verizon’s Firings of Striking Workers
Verizon this week fired 40 workers who took part in the strike this summer by 45,000 Communications Workers of America (CWA) and Electrical Workers (IBEW) members. The corporation is alleging workers engaged in misconduct during the strike.
IBEW Local 2222 Legislative Director Paul Feeney told the Boston Globe:
We think this is a heavy-handed technique that Verizon is using to pressure us at the negotiating table. The union is going to fight this through the court. The company couldn’t prove to us that they did anything wrong.
CWA spokesperson Candace Johnson told the paper that other striking workers who were fired have returned to work after their records have been cleared.
We are continuing to pursue a fair determination for all Verizon workers who were fired.
The workers returned to work under the old contract, and negotiations for a new pact are continuing.
N.H. Workers Buoyed by Today’s Victory
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AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report.
Workers and union leaders in New Hampshire were ecstatic that months of hard work in New Hampshire paid off today when the state House failed to override Gov. John Lynch’s (D) veto of a so-called right to work bill. Nearly 100 teachers, firefighters, postal workers and others showed up to ask their legislators to support the veto during the high-stakes session day and urged lawmakers to withstand pressure from Republican presidential candidates Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry as well as a rowdy group of Americans for Prosperity volunteers bused into New Hampshire for the day.
“I was confident that the reps on our side would be there, but it was still really nerve-wracking in the House,” said Felicia Augevich, a Fairpoint employee and member of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1400 who helped monitor the session at the Legislature today.
I’m really proud of how everyone came together—Democrats and Republicans, private-sector and public-sector workers. We’re hoping that the victory today will send a positive message to the public, to the middle class, and to all of New Hampshire that collective bargaining really is what guarantees good wages and benefits for Americans. We’ve had one victory, but we still have a lot ahead of us.
Verizon Paid a -2.9% Tax Rate from 2008-2010
This is a cross-post by Kenneth Quinnell from Crooks & Liars.
Citizens for Tax Justice released a report Tuesday that shows anti-union telecom company Verizon not only paid no taxes in the past three years, the company received nearly $1 billion in rebates from the government.
Verizon enjoyed some $14 billion in federal and state corporate income tax subsidies in the 2008-2010 period even though it earned $33.4 billion in pre-tax U.S. income during that time.
At the federal level, Verizon should have paid about $11.4 billion at the statutory rate of 35 percent during the three-year period. Instead, it got $951 million in rebates, putting its federal tax subsidies at $12.3 billion. Its effective federal tax rate was -2.9 percent.
Verizon also has managed to avoid most state-level taxes as well, while pursuing a strong anti-worker set of policies that we have reported on previously. The company has demanded $1 billion in benefit concessions from workers despite paying no taxes and raking in profits. Follow the Unity@Verizon campaign by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) here.
CWA Joins with Occupy Activists to Protest Corporate Greed at Verizon
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Chanting, “We are the 99 percent; you are the 99 percent,” Verizon workers represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) yesterday marched through downtown Washington, D.C., joining with activists from the Occupy movement. Some protesters carried signs that read, “Occupy Verizon.”
Latasha Carpenter of CWA Local 2108 said she felt a strong feeling of solidarity with the Occupy protesters. She told us:
There’s an attack on working families across the world. It’s not just unions—it’s about everybody. What the people of Occupy DC and across the world are trying to do—we have to fight. It’s a global movement, and it’s going to flourish…a lot of people fought to get us where we are now….Those of us who are having the baton passed onto us, we have to take it and say, “We’re not going back.”
Beginning their march at Freedom Plaza, just blocks from the White House, where the “Stop the Read the rest of this entry »
