Bell Breakup Forces CWA to Shift Gears : Union Must Cope With a Diversity of Management
The Communications Workers of America is faced with making as dramatic a transformation as any union in U.S. history as it attempts to cope with massive changes in the telecommunications industry, according to its leaders and labor observers.
For nearly 40 years, the CWA has had a rather friendly relationship with American Telephone & Telegraph and most of its subsidiaries--the companies that employed the bulk of the union’s 650,000 members.
But the union--like the telecommunications industry, has been in upheaval since Jan. 1, 1984, when a federal judge ordered the breakup of AT&T.; Since then, the company has divested itself of its regional telephone operating companies and the telecommunications business has been opened to competition. As a result, the CWA faces a new era that may be characterized by a considerably more contentious labor relations climate.
‘Different Atmosphere’
“It’s a different atmosphere in which they must operate,” said Audrey Freedman, a labor relations associate at the Conference Board, a New York-based business research organization.
“I don’t know of another union that has faced this radical a shift in its environment.
“The CWA really was formed and grew up with the Bell System, as it was--a regulated monopoly,” Freedman noted. “And the union has all the characteristics of the employment system in which it was generated--a regulated monopoly. Its structure, its regions, its departments, all of them are formed around what used to be the Bell System. It has to transform itself completely. I don’t know if they can do it,” said Freedman, who was an economist for the CWA from 1958 to 1960.
At the CWA’s convention here last week, Morton Bahr, the organization’s newly elected president, declared that the union is up to the challenge. “Our union has grown from the cradle of struggle,” he said, noting that the CWA emerged out of employees’ desire for a consolidated national telephone workers union after the first countrywide telephone strike in 1947.
Broadened Base
“Our union has matured from our ability to change,” he added in his acceptance speech, referring to the fact that the union has broadened its base by organizing thousands of government employees and health care workers in recent years.
“CWA will be a union in motion--unwedded to an approach but wedded to an outcome,” Bahr said. “We’ll try new things, drop what doesn’t work and try something else. I expect 2001 will find CWA organizing in outer space.”
However, since 1982, the union has lost 60,000 members in the telephone business. And Bahr acknowledged that he and the union face many problems in coping with “the massive changes generated by divestiture, technological change and Reaganomics.”
Workers in industries that have been deregulated in the past few years--such as airlines and trucking--have been faced with demands for major concessions, including two-tier wage systems, as companies attempt to cut costs in a competitive environment. This has led to several bitter strikes, most of which have not ended well for the unions.
Tough Bargaining
And next year, when the CWA has to negotiate new contracts with AT&T;, it may face tougher bargaining than in the past, particularly with some of the new regional telephone companies.
Bahr said those 1986 negotiations are the union’s most immediate concern. But he also laid out an ambitious agenda of other activities that include more organizing and political activity, particularly on the local level, and efforts to strengthen the union internally.
The union took some first steps in that direction at the convention, restructuring most of its regions to adhere more closely to the telephone operating companies’ territories. Additionally, for the first time in its history the union elected a woman--Barbara Easterling, a veteran Ohio CWA official--as one of its three top officers. “It was about time,” said Ann Crump, president of a CWA local in Milwaukee, Wis., noting that 53% of the union’s members are women and that many women have been activists in the union for years.
Campaign Against IBM
Bahr also took a bold and potentially risky step by announcing that the CWA will launch a long-term, worldwide organizing campaign against IBM, a corporation considered immune to unionization. “We must not allow our union to be frozen into inaction by fear of failure,” said Bahr. There has never been a major organizing drive at IBM.
To people who know Bahr, though, the targeting of IBM did not come as a surprise. “He’s an activist. He’s not going to wait for things to happen,” said Larry Cohen, the union’s 36-year-old New Jersey director, whom Bahr hired as an organizer 10 years ago.
Freedman of the Conference Board agreed: “He’s a strong person. He’s smart.” She said he was a particularly good choice to head the union now because of his background as an organizer. “He’s used to a more rough-and-tumble environment” than his predecessor Glenn Watts, who had headed the union since 1974.
Watts is considered a dedicated trade unionist. But even admirers of the mild-mannered, frequently gray-suited man said he could have passed for an AT&T; vice president.
No one is saying that about Morty Bahr, as he’s known around the union.
CWA Member Since 1954
Bahr, 59, has been in the CWA since 1954, when he helped organize McKay Radio, a telegram subsidiary of International Telephone & Telegraph. Soon after, he became president of his local, and in 1957 he undertook a three-year campaign to unionize the 24,000 workers at New York Telephone. Bahr succeeded in the face of strong opposition and then beat off several raiding attempts by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
He became vice president in charge of the CWA’s District 1--New York, New Jersey and New England--in 1969. In the past decade, CWA’s membership in the district has increased to 140,000 from 65,000, with a big chunk of the gain coming from organizing government workers.
In 1981, Bahr played an active role in the union’s first major venture in public sector organizing--winning the right to represent 34,000 New Jersey state government employees by defeating the larger American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The two unions are now involved in a hot battle to represent public workers in Ohio, with elections in several large bargaining units expected this fall.
Bachelor’s Degree
At the gathering here, Bahr--who recently received a bachelor’s degree after having completed years of night school while working for the union--made it clear that he would speak out on a wide range of issues. He said he was disturbed that Labor Secretary William Brock, in a speech to the convention, endorsed the idea of setting lower minimum wage rates for teen-agers than for adults. He attacked the Reagan Administration for not requiring farmers to provide farm workers with toilet facilities or drinking water and said he opposed U.S. “intervention” in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
A longtime Democratic Party activist, Bahr is close to two of its potential 1988 presidential candidates, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
But Bahr doesn’t have much time to think about presidential politics at the moment.
Complex Negotiations
He is preparing for the most complex set of contract negotiations the CWA--or perhaps any other union--has ever undertaken. “The union will have to deal with AT&T; and its former operating companies at the same time,” said AT&T; spokesman John Gagen. “The interests of each of those companies is diverging and going more separate every day. They will be very different organizations than the union faced in 1983,” Gagen said.
At this point, the union seems least concerned about the AT&T; talks. Bahr said bargaining there is likely to proceed much as before, except that it will involve about 175,000 workers rather than 500,000 as in the past.
He said job security issues will be at the forefront because of recent sizable layoffs by AT&T; and the regional companies.
Seven Regional Companies
Bargaining with the seven regional companies is likely to be more difficult than with AT&T;, Bahr said. Even the format of those talks is at issue. For example, some of those companies want the union to negotiate with individual subsidiaries. “We believe company-by-company bargaining (rather than regional bargaining) will better suit the needs of the companies and their customers,” said John L. Baird, a spokesman for Bell Atlantic. That Philadelphia-based company’s subsidiaries include telephone firms providing service to residents of Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington.
But Bahr said state-by-state bargaining will result in delay and unnecessary confrontation. And he stressed that the union would refuse to accept concessions, two-tier wage systems “or any other form of erosion in our contracts.”
Bahr also accused the regional companies of being two-faced, asking for the union’s help in dealing with state regulatory agencies on rate increases while at the same time setting up new businesses that they intend to operate on a non-union basis.
Opposed Rate Increases
This spring the CWA joined consumer groups in Pennsylvania and Washington in opposing rate increase requests made by Bell of Pennsylvania and Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone, two subsidiaries of Bell Atlantic, one of the companies that has said it will attempt to keep unionization out of its newly formed businesses. Such opposition to a rate increase would have been unheard of before deregulation, union officials said.
Baird of Bell Atlantic criticized the CWA’s action. “It’s a pretty radical step on their part. To oppose a rate increase jeopardizes a company’s earnings, and that leads to poor service and less job security,” Baird said.
However, one union complaint was that the regional holding companies were planning to use profits from their regulated telephone subsidiaries to help start new, non-union businesses in the unregulated sector of the communications industry. “Cooperation is a two-way street that doesn’t just walk in the companies’ direction,” Bahr said. “They cannot expect us to cooperate with them if they insist on a so-called union-free environment in the operations of their unregulated subsidiaries.”
