The International Herald Tribune, June 2, 2005, Thursday

Copyright 2005 International Herald Tribune
The International Herald Tribune

June 2, 2005 Thursday

SECTION: FINANCE; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 740 words

HEADLINE: U.S. telecommunications unions are facing an uphill battle

BYLINE: Matt Richtel

SOURCE: The New York Times

DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO:

BODY:
Lisa Morowitz feels worn down.
Morowitz, a longtime union coordinator, spends her days trying to organize cable workers at Comcast. The workers are not only declining to sign up but also in many cases have voted to sever links to unions.
"We're not winning we're losing," said Morowitz, who is 39 and works for the Communications Workers of America, the dominant union in telecommunications. "If we don't move the direction this industry is moving, we could become obsolete."
Unions in general are struggling in the United States, with just 12.5 percent of the total work force unionized in 2004, compared with 22 percent in 1980, but they face a particularly bleak future in the telecommunications industry.
The industry was once a labor stronghold, after the Bell telephone monopolies became unionized in the late 1930s. But mergers, deregulation and technological change have reduced the number of jobs at the traditional phone companies while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in cable and wireless companies, which are largely nonunionized.
Since 1985, the number of union workers in telephone and data services has been cut by more than half, to fewer than 275,000 from 625,000.
To slow the rapid decline, unions are fighting to organize workers at cable and wireless companies. They have had little success, apart from a big victory in 2000 at Cingular Wireless.
At Comcast, the largest cable provider in the United States, workers have voted to decertify nearly two dozen union shops in the past three years.
The labor battle took on a new intensity last month when the Communications Workers of America published in three major newspapers a full-page letter signed by 112 members of Congress asserting that Verizon Wireless was not cooperating with labor groups.
Verizon Wireless countered by circulating among employees a document that favorably compared its benefits and wages with those at Cingular Wireless, still the only U.S. wireless company with a unionized work force. In April, the Verizon Wireless chief executive, Dennis Strigl, sent a letter to members of Congress urging them not to sign the union petition, calling it an unfair attack.
The employees "have repeatedly rejected the efforts of the union to insert itself between them and their company," Strigl wrote. "Unfortunately, the union will not take 'no' for an answer."
The communications workers' union contends that Verizon Wireless has harassed organizers and moved three major call centers from the Northeastern part of the country to Southern states where it is traditionally more difficult to organize.
The union has focused on Comcast and Verizon Wireless. But it is trying to organize other companies, too. The Communications Workers of America and other international unions plan this month to try to spur talks with T-Mobile, a national wireless carrier, by negotiating with executives from its parent company, Deutsche Telekom.
But reversing the antiunion tide would be enormously difficult. In 1985, unions represented 375,000 workers at the regional Bell telephone companies and 250,000 at AT&T, said Jeff Keefe, an associate professor of labor and employment relations at Rutgers University.
By 2004, the union work force at the Bells had dropped to about 229,000, and AT&T's was below 30,000, Keefe said.
Meanwhile, the wireless industry has grown to about 171,000 employees, with only about 22,000 workers at Cingular unionized. In the cable industry, which has 133,000 workers, only about 7,000 are unionized.
In terms of pay and benefits, the difference between union and nonunion workplaces can be substantial, Keefe argues.
Based on research compiled by Keefe and Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University who studies collective bargaining, a union technician at a Bell company in 2003 earned an average of $46,500 a year, compared with $39,400 for a technician in the wireless industry and $35,700 at a cable company
Katz said the erosion of collective bargaining in telecommunications was not as severe as in the garment and textile industries but was as bad as, if not worse than, that in many other industries.
The unions, he said, need to modify their message to give workers a sense that organized labor can protect them in a time of economic turbulence but in an age when few employees need to worry about industrial hazards like "losing a limb in a steel plant."