Communications Workers Vow ‘Long-Term, Worldwide’ Effort : Union Launches Drive to Organize IBM
The newly elected president of the Communications Workers of America said Tuesday that the union will launch “a long-term, worldwide, coordinated organizing campaign against IBM,” a corporation long considered immune to unionization.
Morton Bahr, the union leader, said he has discussed the campaign with Japanese telephone union officials at his union’s convention here this week. He also said he will go to Switzerland in September to hold discussions on the subject with European labor leaders.
Additionally, Bahr said the communications workers are likely to form a coalition with other U.S. unions in the IBM effort, similar to the way the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Service Employees International Union joined forces in a successful organizing drive at Beverly Enterprises, a large Pasadena-based nursing home chain.
IBM, which has long enjoyed a reputation as a benevolent employer, has no unions at any of its domestic facilities. “There’s never been a sustained organizing effort by any outside organization at IBM, and there never has been a National Labor Relations Board representation election at IBM,” said Tom Mattia, a company spokesman, in a telephone interview from the company’s Armonk, N.Y., headquarters.
Unionized Workers in Europe
“We have always considered ourselves an outstanding employer,” Mattia said. “We have a wide range of employee relations programs to meet the needs of our employees, and our employees have never felt the need to organize,” he added. IBM has 394,000 employees in 120 countries worldwide, including 238,000 in the United States.
Mattia acknowledged that some IBM workers in France, Germany and other European countries are organized, but he said he was not sure how many.
Bahr conceded that taking on IBM will be no easy task. And he made it clear that he does not expect to organize the communications giant, which had net income of $6.6 billion last year, overnight.
But he said the need for such a campaign was clear from the union’s point of view. Bahr noted that IBM recently completed a deal by which it can acquire as much as 30% of MCI Communications, the second-largest U.S. long-distance company.
“Coupled with their ownership of Rolm and their videotex deal with CBS and Sears, IBM has now put together the pieces which make it a head-to-head competitor with AT&T;,” a company at which the communications union represents most hourly employees.
If IBM remains non-union, there is a strong possibility, union officials feel, that AT&T; would feel pressured to seek to reduce wages and benefits for competitive reasons. “IBM--and all of the other non-union competitors in the (telecommunications) industry--will come to know that we are serious about protecting our union-won wages, fringe benefits and job security,” Bahr said in his acceptance speech Tuesday afternoon. “And then, IBM’s non-union threat will no longer hover over our bargaining table.”
In response to questions about IBM’s reputation as a good employer, Bahr said the competitive pressures of the burgeoning information industry have led to changes in some of the company’s policies.
“The 75-year history of fraternalism is beginning to crack,” he asserted. Bahr said that a group of employees at IBM’s Binghamton, N.Y., computer equipment manufacturing facility had done some in-plant organizing and developed an informal network with all IBM workers at other locations. Mattia said he is aware of the group’s efforts.
Bahr said the union might start the organizing campaign by offering IBM employees some form of associate membership under which they would be offered services such as low-cost insurance before they had voted for union representation. That idea has been gaining support in labor circles in recent years. Bahr said the union will also continue its effort to get state legislatures to regulate the use of video display terminals, an issue of interest to workers in high-tech companies such as IBM.
Historically, American unions have had very little success in organizing workers in high-tech companies, including California’s Silicon Valley. In the last major organizing campaign of this type, a group of production workers at Atari Inc. in San Jose voted against union representation by a wide margin in November, 1983.
