December 14, 2005

CWA, by the numbers

Besides the Newspaper Guild, other sectors of the CWA include the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET), the International Union of Electronic Workers (IUE), the International Typographical Union and the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA).

A quarter of the CWA’s membership, some 150,000 members, are state and local government employees, law enforcement personnel, and health care and education employees including 40,000 public workers in New Jersey.

The CWA’s largest newspaper unit is the New York Times with 2,660 members, followed by Knight-Ridder with 2,480, Dow Jones with 1,940 and the Washington Post with 1,005.

The largest broadcaster represented by the CWA is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with 4,800 members, NBC has 2,620, ABC 2,230, and Fox 1,310. CBS has only 330 employees in the CWA.

In telecommunications, there are 103,390 SBC employees in the CWA and 69,350 employees of Verizon.

The CWA also include 15,740 employees of United Airlines, 13,010 of USAirways and 8,590 GE employees.

The CWA has also been branching out into public and higher education in California, Texas and New York, health care and public safety in California, Texas and West Virginia.

“We owe it to those who built this movement to build on this foundation,’’ said CWA vice president Jeff Reichenbach.