| January
27, 2006
CWA and Verizon Information Services reached
a tentative agreement on Jan. 26, which, if
approved by the membership, will end the 13-week
strike by 300 VIS workers in New York.
CWA Locals 1105, 1122, and 1118 will hold
contract explanation meetings and ratification
votes between now and Feb. 2; the CWA bargaining
team is strongly recommending ratification.
CWA District 1 Vice President Chris Shelton
praised the determination and solidarity of the
VIS workers. Our members "should be proud, for
standing up for themselves and their brothers
and sisters in a way that management never
thought we were capable of," he said.
Democracy and workers' rights go hand in hand
in a way Europeans understand far better than
most Americans, CWA President Larry Cohen told
an audience today at the Institute for
International Economics ins Washington,
D.C.
"Only 7.8 percent of American workers have
collective bargaining rights. That is the lowest
of any industrial democracy," Cohen said,
speaking on an international panel about labor.
The conference was sponsored by Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung, a private institute that promotes
social democracy.
Meanwhile, Cohen said top American executives
negotiate salary and benefit packages so
exorbitant they stun many European executives,
who wonder why anyone deserves or needs that
much compensation.
"It's a race to the bottom, except for those
at the top," Cohen said, warning that many such
aspects of the American business model may well
find their way to Europe, unless public policy
remains strong enough to protect workers and
consumers.
Cohen said businesses in the United States
link public policy with regulation, but, in
fact, policies can set goals for the public good
that benefit everyone. He noted, for instance,
how policies set by Japan and Sweden are
ensuring that all communities in those countries
will soon have access to high-speed
Internet.
"Whether in airlines, in telecommunications,
in health care, you don't abandon public
policy," he said, lamenting that that's exactly
what the United States has done.
He noted that labor has been central to
progressive democracy in the United States,
describing how it was unions that first
negotiated health care for workers, among other
benefits. From union members, the trend spread
to other private employers and then to public
sector workers.
"Since then, we face the extinction of
bargaining rights in every single industry," he
said, emphasizing that the right to join unions
in the United States exists only on paper as
employers threaten and fire union supporters
with near impunity. "For many workers, it's a
choice between your career or your ability to
join an organization of your choosing."
Still, Cohen said he's hopeful, and inspired
by the courage of workers around the world who
are fighting for and winning rights at
work. "You don't have to be among the
corporate elite, the wealthy, to have a voice at
work," he said, praising the global union
activists. "It's their world, too. No matter how
much they've been knocked down, they stand
up."
Citing support from CWA and unions around the
world, the Chunghwa Telecom Workers Union
announced a new collective bargaining agreement
with Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan that provides
key safeguards for members in the aftermath of
the company's privatization.
CWA and the AFL-CIO played a major role in
focusing the attention of U.S. investors and the
public on potential problems of the stock sale
and supported the 28,000 Chunghwa workers in
their fight for fairness.
In addition to building support from the
international labor community, the Chunghwa
workers went on strike in August and CTWU
officers conducted a hunger strike to spotlight
the negative effects of the privatization plan
on longtime, loyal workers.
CTWU President Chang Hsu-chung outlined
the contract's gains for members, which include
no pay cuts or layoffs over the next five years;
additional bonuses and dividends; a requirement
for negotiation and agreement by labor and
management over changes resulting from new
legislation; and continued tuition subsidies for
workers' children, among others.
In its union-busting war waged against
members of its TNG-CWA local, executives at the
York Daily Record in Pennsylvania have taken aim
at the one thing that should be sacred in the
media business: freedom of speech.
Management this week shut down discussion
threads on its online message board that were
started by community members concerned about the
paper's vigorous anti-union campaign. Further,
it has electronically barred the participants
from any of the board's many other online
discussions.
The paper has also refused to publish any of
what the Guild believes to be at least 50
letters to editor submitted in support of Local
38218. And when contract negotiations began last
summer, among management's demands was an
"anti-disparagement" clause to bar workers from
speaking out about the paper among themselves or
to anyone else.
"We're in the business of free speech,"
reporter and negotiating team member Lauri Lebo
said. "They tried to restrict our speech and now
they're restricting the public's speech and I
find that terribly frightening."
The local represents 55 workers in the Daily
Record's newsroom. Their last contract expired
Sept. 30, at which point the company had already
hired the notorious union-busting law firm King
& Ballow.
Lebo said union negotiators have barely
addressed core issues of wages and benefits as
the company has tied them up with demands for
harsh management rights provisions,
subcontracting and work hour issues that would
avoid overtime and give employees no say over
their schedules. The demands are so extreme that
Lebo said a reporter could wind up working 15
hours one day and be told to come in for one
hour the next.
- CWA President Larry Cohen joined
striking members of the UAW-Graduate Student
Organizing Committee/UAW Local 2110 and hundreds
of union, faculty and community supporters at a
Jan. 26 rally at New York
University.
The strike by
graduate teaching and research assistants is
moving into its second semester. The plan "is to
stay out on strike as long as it takes to bring
NYU to the bargaining table," said Michael Palm,
NYU unit chair.
Some 1,000 graduate
student employees walked off the job Nov. 9 to
protest NYU's refusal to bargaining a second
contract. In August, the school announced it
would no longer recognize the union, citing an
NLRB decision that abolished labor law
protections for graduate student employees.
Nothing in that ruling prohibits NYU and other
universities from voluntarily recognizing the
union.
More information is available at
www.2110uaw.org/gsoc/.
- As part of their "Leave All Blades
Behind" campaign, hundreds of flight attendants
represented by AFA-CWA will rally and hand out
leaflets on Monday, Jan. 30, at airports across
the country.
Flight attendants
are concerned about recent changes in
Transportation Security Administration policies
that now allow passengers to carry small but
sharp items, including knives, aboard
aircraft.
"AFA members are overwhelmingly
opposed to this change," AFA-CWA President
Patricia Friend said. "Let's not forget,
terrorists hijacked planes on 9-11 using
household items like those that TSA has chosen
to allow back onboard."
Friend said the
activities Monday will put further pressure on
the TSA, which so far has ignored the union and
its supporters in Congress. Friend has testified
before Congressional committees and said members
of both parties have approached the TSA as a
result, but the agency has refused to
budge.
- A record number of journalists and
media workers were killed in the line of duty in
2005, leading The International Federation of
Journalists to call for international action to
counter what has largely been impunity for the
killers.
"It is critical that
the U.S. government and the world community act
to bring the killers of all journalists and
media workers to justice," said TNG-CWA
President Linda Foley, an IFJ vice president.
"The ability of reporters to fully tell their
stories is what guarantees freedom of the press
for all of us."
In "Targeting and Tragedy
— Journalists and Media Casualties in the Field
of Journalism and Newsgathering," the IFJ
documented a record toll of 150 killings. Of the
dead, 89 were killed in the line of duty, many
of them assassinated by killers working for
political gangs or criminals. Another 61 were
killed on assignment by some kind of disaster,
48 at one time by a plane crash in
Tehran.
The federation is seeking action
by the United Nations Security Council and has
called on the Secretary General of the United
Nations to press governments to act on the
report's grim findings. "Impunity in the killing
of journalists remains the intolerable scandal
of our times that can no longer be ignored by
the international community," IFJ General
Secretary Aidan White said.
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