The New York Times, February 21, 2006, Tuesday

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

February 21, 2006 Tuesday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: In Wireless World, Cingular Bucks the Antiunion Trend

BYLINE: By MATT RICHTEL

BODY:
Cingular Wireless and Vodafone engaged in a furious bidding war two years ago to acquire AT&T Wireless. Rooting for Cingular was an unexpected fan, Kelvin Banks, a single father working at an AT&T customer service center in Jackson, Miss.
Mr. Banks was moved by a little-publicized fact about Cingular: it has had relatively warm relations with unions.
The day after the company won a $41 billion auction for AT&T Wireless, Mr. Banks contacted labor officials and helped to pull off a rare but significant union organizing success story in the digital age.
Since July 2005, the Communications Workers of America has unionized 16,500 former AT&T Wireless workers at Cingular Wireless retail stores and call centers nationwide -- a move that runs counter to the longstanding trend in the telecommunications industry and American workplaces in general. And many of those Cingular shops are in the South, where unionizing efforts have been difficult historically.
Cingular's wireless competitors have fought, at times fiercely, against unionization, arguing that an organized labor force would hobble their ability to move workers, cut costs and make changes necessary to compete in a high-tech industry. They often assert that unions ultimately hurt the workers they claim to protect.
But the growth of Cingular into the nation's largest wireless carrier -- with a nearly fully unionized labor force -- has challenged those assumptions and given a new spark to organized labor, said Harry C. Katz, dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.
''The fact Cingular does well even in the face of unionization helps rebut the argument that unions aren't viable in a technologically sophisticated and dynamic industry,'' Mr. Katz said.
That said, he noted that the union's success remained particular to Cingular. ''It has not contributed to a noticeable rebirth more broadly,'' Mr. Katz said. ''Whether there will be a larger resurgence -- that remains to be seen.''
From the union's perspective, the success at Cingular shows what it can accomplish when it tries to organize at a company that is not averse to organized labor.
At communications and public utility companies, the percentage of unionized workers dropped to 21.8 percent in 2002, from 42.4 percent in 1983 (using the most recent available data organized by those categories), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To a large extent, the decline reflects the industry's deregulation and the shrinking work force at the heavily unionized Baby Bells.
By comparison, the percentage of unionized workers in service industries over all fell to 5.7 percent in 2002, from 7.7 percent in 1983, according to the bureau.
On Wall Street, telecommunications industry analysts said the financial impact of Cingular's union contracts was not yet clear. But ''there's not a perception on Wall Street that it's a problem,'' said Jeffrey Halpern, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
He noted that a unionized work force did not appear to have hindered Cingular's ability to cut costs or streamline its staffing, though the company lagged its competitors in some areas, like retention of new subscribers.
About 225,000 people, including managers, work in the wireless industry, and around 39,000 of them belong to a union. Nearly all of these workers are at Cingular. (The cable operators, with a work force of around 176,000, including managers and union-eligible workers, had about 7,000 union workers as of last year.)
The C.W.A. has been successful in organizing stores and centers around the country, a few hundred workers at a time. Last month, it organized 1,288 Cingular customer service workers in Orlando, Fla. In December, the union added 158 Cingular workers in Hawaii, 400 in Pennsylvania, 121 in Colorado, 51 in Iowa, and 36 in Illinois.
Mr. Banks said the idea of organizing the call center in Jackson was unthinkable when it was still part of AT&T Wireless because workers considered that company ''very antiunion.''
So ''it was a real big deal'' when the union was certified last March, after winning the support of roughly 60 percent of some 500 workers, said Mr. Banks, the union's shop steward in Jackson.
Union officials said that what set Cingular apart from other wireless carriers and cable companies was, quite simply, that it was not actively antiunion. To be sure, the company and the union have clashed in numerous contract negotiations. But Cingular has not tried to dissuade employees from joining the union. At places like Jackson, for instance, the company did not lobby employees to reject a union or argue that doing so would hurt them and the company.
Instead, Cingular has sent the message that labor can be an ally.
The partnership with the union ''provides us a competitive advantage,'' said Lew Walker, Cingular's vice president for human resources, operations and labor relations. ''We do believe it has a positive bottom line impact on the company.''
Mr. Walker said the company had benefited by getting the union's support with politicians and regulators, including its endorsement for the acquisition of AT&T Wireless. He also said Cingular had benefited in being the wireless carrier of choice among other unions and organizations that want to patronize a union-friendly company, though he declined to specify how much revenue came from those entities.
Cingular's acceptance of unions may also be attributable to tradition at SBC Communications, which merged with AT&T last year and adopted the AT&T name. It owns 60 percent of Cingular, with the remainder owned by the BellSouth Corporation.
Critical to the union's success is its strategy of fighting for ''neutrality agreements'' -- accords under which companies promise not to try to dissuade nonunion employees from organizing, said Rosemary Batt, an associate professor of human resource studies at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell. Such agreements were in place at SBC and Cingular.
Of course, neutrality alone does not guarantee success, said Edward Sabol, organizing director for the communications workers. The union, he said, still has had to win majority support in each bargaining unit, within 60 days of officially beginning organizing campaigns. But he said that effort is much easier without challenges from the company.
And the union has not always been successful, even with a neutrality agreement. Despite such an agreement with Verizon Wireless, which expired in 2004, the C.W.A. failed to organize workers at that company.
The union asserts that, despite the agreement, Verizon Wireless continued to discourage workers from joining.
Indeed, in December a federal administrative law judge in Washington issued a ruling that Verizon Wireless broke federal labor law in 2003 and 2004 by discouraging union organizing at a call center in Orangeburg, N.Y. The judge ordered Verizon to post a notice at a call center in Wilmington, N.C., where the work from Orangeburg had been moved, saying the company would cease activities like prohibiting workers from discussing unions on their break time.
Verizon said it was appealing the decision, which it claims to have lost on technical grounds. More generally, the company argues that its workers rejected a union because they were treated better and were paid more than unionized Cingular workers.
Last April, Verizon Wireless published a comparison showing that its average salaries were 33 percent to 44 percent higher than several thousand Cingular employees in some bargaining units. But the union disputes these figures, arguing they are not representative of the overall picture.
As for the former AT&T Wireless workers, they say joining the union offers some job protection. Last September, about 70 percent of the roughly 950 workers at a Cingular customer service center in Oklahoma City pledged support for the union, in part, said Michael Ahern, the chief union steward at the call center, because the workers were concerned about job security under the new management.
Mr. Ahern said that Cingular had been very strict about imposing quality standards on call center employees. He said that employees were regularly dismissed for failing to answer phone calls quickly enough to fill their quota, while trying to solve customer problems and be empathic.
Mr. Ahern said neither the union nor the management was happy with the rate of job turnover, and that both sides were negotiating on ways to retain workers, who might be able to meet the requirements with more training. Mr. Ahern said the union succeeded in getting workers a guarantee of a twice-a-year salary increase, compared with once-a-year performance-based raises at AT&T Wireless.
As a result, he said, more workers are beginning to trust the idea of a union, something that many would not have considered under a previous employer.
''It's changing,'' he said. But ''it's been slow.''


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GRAPHIC: Photo: Kelvin Banks has helped with efforts to unionize Cingular communications workers in Jackson, Miss. (Photo by Suzi Altman for The New York Times)(pg. C2)GraphUnion membership for wage and salary workers employed byGraph tracks union membership for wage and salary workers employed by the following since 1985:All industriesWired telecommunications carriersUtilities industry(Sources by Bureau of Labor Statistics
www.unionstats.com via Moody's Economy.com)(pg. C1)