…why muck around somewhere else? That’s what I thought when reading Matt Richtel’s piece today in The New York Times about the struggles of the Communications Workers Union to organize in the telecommunications industry. It’s possible that Richtel has his facts wrong–I never doubt that possibility when reading the Times (for example, it cannot be that the CWA has “2.5 million workers worldwide”…) –but, even so, the trend is unmistakable: an industry where we had a strong grip is now growing into a non-union operation.
The upshot of the story is this: in the olden days, when we had something called the Bell system, it was heavily unionized. But, with the disintegration of the Bell system, the rise of cable and wireless, and the endless spate of buyouts and mergers, the industry’s non-union sector is on the rise.
Check these numbers out: from having 375,000 workers at the surviving Bell companies and 250,000 at AT&T in 1985, there are now just 229,000 Bell union workers and 30,000 at the decimated AT&T. By contrast, the wireless industry has grown to about 171,000 workers but only 22,000 are unionized (subscribe to that unionized Cingular system today!!!). In cable, it’s worse: 133,000 workers with only 7,000 unionized. And let’s not even talk about the closely-related computer industry, which is essentially 100 percent non-union.
To be clear: this is a fairly common story. The reason CWA has had a tough time organizing workers, despite its laudable focus on organizing, is that this industry is fiercely anti-union and uses the usual diet of threat, intimidation and firings against workers.
So, I thought back to a few weeks ago when I mentioned that CWA and UNITE-HERE were engaged in a fight over who should organize tribal casinos in California. John Wilhelm of UNITE-HERE has a letter in hand from Morty Bahr promising that CWA would not touch the casinos in California.
Promises or not, the situation described in the Times article–a situaton that was no secret–just raises the question: when should a union focus on its core industry and when should it branch out? To its credit, CWA is one of the unions grappling with organizing every day. But, it worries me that, with such a big challenge out there, unions are spreading themselves into so many areas that they can’t attack their own core jurisdictions.
My lord, what will the labor movement do if industries with expanding roles in the economy (notice, I don’t say that these jobs are the future of the economy because there will still be a lot of industrial jobs to organize) are largely non-union? One of these large telcom companies would be my choice for a labor movement-wide effort to target a few strategic companies over the next five years (which I suggested here).
