December 14, 2005

Ready for the future

By Michael Ulreich
President, Chicago Newspaper Guild

It seems like the underlying theme of every union meeting I’ve ever attended, on a regional or national basis, has been the decline of union power in America.

Over and over, year after year, we’re given the same depressing statistics. Every year the percentage of American workers with union representation seems to decline even as labor leaders thrash about in their quest to find solutions. Focus groups are convened, local leaders are polled and are then asked to inspire their members to go out and organize.

The Communications Workers of America has just embarked on the latest of these quests, to discover what it would take to convince American workers that labor unions  remain the only way that they can obtain the respect they need in the corporate board rooms and government offices that are now deciding their fate. The CWA also wants to examine its own operations to determine how it can reinvent itself to more effectively serve its members.

“The political power of anti-worker politicians is destroying the communities and living standards of working families,’’ says a new CWA resolution approved last August in Chicago.

The CWA has named its new campaign “CWA: Ready for the Future,’’ which calls for every level of the union to examine the road ahead and identify the ways in which it can best meet those challenges.

 CWA union leaders have already started calling the new movement “Resolution One.’’

“The economy, a hostile legislative environment, corporate mergers and restructurings, have affected nearly all CWA members,’’ said the resolution.

Another challenge has come from within the union movement in the split this fall of seven unions from the AFL-CIO.

Under the new CWA initiative, each local will hold its own discussions on these issues, at executive board and membership meetings. The resolution outlines a 10-month process to develop a strategic plan, which will be reviewed by the CWA’s executive board.

“We’re much smarter collectively than any one of us are individually,’’ said Seth Rosen, the new vice president of CWA’s District 4, which includes Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.

The International is expected to have a discussion guide available for locals as well as a process for collecting local ideas. The guide will be distributed this month to units interested in taking part in the great CWA debate.  The strategic plan will then be discussed and voted on during the annual 2006 CWA convention in Las Vegas.

Guild President Linda Foley recently said that she felt the evaluation process should go on longer than just through the mid-summer.

“The timetable on this is way too short in my opinion,’’ Foley said at a recent Guild council meeting in Wisconsin. “I argued and argued about it but I lost.….(But) this process will not end in July 2006. This is a process that will go on and on.’’

“There Are No Sacred Cows’’

“We are now a union that is the face of a nation representing workers from virtually every walk of life,’’ says CWA Resolution One.

In asking its members for help, the CWA has thrown the door open to criticism of every facet of its union operation.

The last time the CWA engaged in such a process was in 1981 when convention delegates organized a committee on the future.

Twenty-four years later the future is now.

CWA workers face outsourcing in almost every industry, privatization in the public sector, corporate raids on their health care and pension plans and scary financial instability at such problem institutions as auto parts manufacturer Delphi and, subsequently, General Motors.

“There are challenges involved with these changes but there are also opportunities,’’ Foley said.

 
24 Years Later the Future is Now

During the first week of October, Guild executive director Jerry Minkkinen and I attended a meeting of the CWA’s new regional leaders in District 4, the same week that Delphi workers were asked to take horrendous pay cuts to save the company from bankruptcy.

As representatives of the Chicago local of The Newspaper Guild, officially a CWA sector union, we sometimes feel like outsiders.

The CWA is a union of mostly telephone workers now expanding into other ventures such as wireless communication, cable, and, yes, newspapers, and their meetings tend to be overloaded with information regarding such firms as SBC, Verizon and Cingular.

(By the way Cingular is one company in the U.S. that allows the CWA to organize its workers through what is called neutrality, so if you are shopping for a new cell phone provider, think Cingular.)

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).

 The trip to Detroit confirmed our belief that the CWA needs to do a better job of integrating its rank-and-file members with non-telephone workers at all its union functions.

The CWA, now under a new regime (described below) had let us know that this was going to be a different district council meeting than had been run in the past. Yet Jerry and I in Detroit spent the first day listening to speeches. Nothing too different about that. The next morning we attended two mildly interesting workshops, one called “Common Sense Economics,’’ by University of Iowa professor Dave Osterberg. An afternoon session on CWA bargaining didn’t even remotely touch on the concerns of the newspaper business. So I spent the afternoon writing this essay.

“I Thought I’d Just Start with One Modest Goal: To Save The World’’

The Detroit CWA conference featured opening speeches by four men: Seth Rosen and the man he replaced, now CWA international vice president and number two man Jeff Reichenbach; Jim Clark, president of the IUE; and the real star, the new president of the CWA, the man selected to fill the shoes of retiring national labor leader Morty Bahr, Philadelphia native Larry Cohen.

Jeff Reichenbach and Seth Rosen both began their union involvement at Ohio Bell Telephone, Reichenbach was only 19 years old when he ran Cleveland’s Local 4309 in 1973.  Rosen became his administrative assistant and stayed in that post for the last 11 years.

 Larry Cohen replaced Morty Bahr at the Chicago convention in August. He began his union career as a public employee in New Jersey who later helped organize 36,000 state workers. Now he’s president of a international union with 650,000 members. 

“I thought I’d start out with just one modest goal—to change the world,’’ said Rosen of his early career in union organizing.

“We’re going to try some different things. We’re not going to be afraid of trying different things in this district.’’

Among the different things Rosen wants to try is streamlining the grievance and arbitration system for members in District 4. This has virtually no effect on our local because the CWA has a different grievance setup than we do. Our executive board at the local level decides arbitration issues, the CWA requires their members to send grievances through the district. So that’s one change that will have minimal impact on a local like ours in Chicago, where we, and we alone, decide what’s important and what’s not.

Rosen is an intelligent, gregarious and fun-loving labor leader. He replaces Reichenbach, another charming man, tall and articulate and much loved by the staff he left behind in Cleveland. In fact the staff at District 4, the staff which would theoretically answer to our needs in Chicago, are all very friendly and competent people and we as an affiliated union need to find a way to better integrate and use the resources offered by the CWA on the local level.  In fact, Jerry and I have long been communicating with our CWA colleagues and we probably have one of the best relationships with the CWA of any Newspaper Guild local.

However the question is: How do you improve the relationship and become one as a union, without losing your individual identity?

Know What You Believe and Why

The encouraging thing is that both Reichenbach and Rosen are both avid newspaper readers. Reichenbach describes himself as a history buff and Rosen likes to use quotes from historical figures and newspaper columnists.

 “Stand up for working people, the people in the middle and the people who can’t stand on their own,’’ Rosen said in his Detroit speech, quoting Bill Moyers. “Know what you believe and why.’’

Among Rosen’s concerns is that while the CWA has organized the majority of SBC and Verizon workers, they have virtually zero representation in Sprint/Nextel and very few members represented in Time/Warner and Comcast, so three of the top five companies in the telecommunications industry are non-union.

Rosen noted that that seven percent of Americans use cell phones exclusively without using any land-based telephones and the number of cell phones now exceeds the number of telephones. By the end of 2006, he said, Comcast, a mostly non-union firm, plans to be able to offer telephone service wherever they have cable connections.

“We have to struggle to keep us with all the changes but we have the people resources to do this,’’ Rosen said.

Why should you be interested in all this cell phone business? Because this is YOUR union too.

“We Don’t Know What It Means to Bend Over’’

Cohen is an moving contrast to the grandfatherly Morty Bahr, who seemed more at ease on the podium directing a convention that down on the floor pumping hands. Cohen’s always in motion.It seems he will never be at ease, as long as one worker remains left somewhere to be organized.

.“We don’t know what it means to bend over,’’ Cohen said in Detroit. “We will stand up, we will be proud, we will have a vision and we will stand up and fight for that vision together.’’

Cohen remarked on the recent revolution within the AFL-CIO, where four major unions, including the Teamsters and the Carpenters, seceded from the national union and split the “labor movement …….. at the worst possible time.’’

 The CWA opposed the split from the AFL-CIO.

“Now more than ever we need solidarity in the union movement,’’ Cohen said.

In contrast to Rosen and Cohen,  Reichenbach was relentlessly political. The Cleveland native reminded his listeners of “the brick we laid in Ohio’’ that helped give Bush a second term, a constant reminder, he said,  that “the political work we need to do doesn’t begin on election day….it begins every day.’’

 Of course many members of the Newspaper Guild flinch from taking the political responsibility the CWA embraces with its awards and the merchandise it provides for those who make contributions to the CWA political fund called COPE.

To show the cultural gulf between the CWA and the Newspaper Guild, one such award was a dinner with Jerry Springer.

Nevertheless

Thinking Out of the Triangle

The discussion at the CWA meeting in Detroit was followed the next month with a more intimate exchange at a Newspaper Guild Midwest District Council meeting in Sheboygan.

We were in Sheboygan because the president of the Sheboygan local, Amy Barr, was fired from her job along with her vice-chairman, allegedly for misconduct but in fact she had been targeted by the Gannett organization for being a well-known and competent union leader. The Guild has filed grievances in both cases and they are headed to arbitration. (Her alleged offense was publicly laughing at an obituary photo.)

The Guild uses District Council meetings to touch base with union leaders in the same part of the country and structures the Saturday meetings with an agenda of newspaper and union-related issues.

We met in a wood-paneled second story room at Sheboygan’s Dock Side Inn and among those attending were Jerry Minkkinen and I, Guild President Linda Foley, Chicago native Dayna Brown, president of the Midwest District Council and the Peoria local, and representatives from Minnesota, Denver, Milwaukee, and Kenosha as well as Amy Barr

Foley addressed the concerns people had that the CWA, through its new initiative, may be trying to take a more consolidating approach to its member unions like the Newspaper Guild.

 “We’re not the Teamsters,’ ’Foley said of one union known for its control of its member locals. (But)  “ I don’t think the CWA has successfully figured out  how to effectively combine all the sectors.

“They need to know that we bring a lot to the table,’’ Foley said. “And that we’re all a lot stronger working together.’’

Foley said this new initiative, Resolution One, may be a way to steer the cumbersome communications union in a different direction.

“This should be a signal to you and your members that the CWA is going to change the way they do business,’’ Foley said.

Foley said the new CWA initiative is essentially asking: What do our local unions need to do to be more effective, what can TNG do to make locals more effective  and what can the CWA do to make locals more effective?

Here’s some ideas right off the top of my head:

The CWA’s famous “Triangle’’ of Organizing, Political/Community Action and Bargaining/Representation needs to be rethought and recast into something that better represents the myriad difficulties and challenges facing not just unions but working people in this country.

Labor unions need to rally around every issue that affects working people, not just the traditional union issues but the core concerns of America’s laboring class, with problems like health insurance, disappearing pensions, the attack on Social Security and even foreign policy, especially when it results in the premature deaths of our sons and daughters overseas.

  A union has to care about all the people. We need to become the voice of working people and find and implement solid answers to the problems facing all  people before we can expect them to join our cause.

It certainly can’t be politics as usual, with the union movement acting as just another lobbying group looking after its own self-interest.

Until we really Look to the Future, and take decisive actions to further our cause,  the numbers will continue to go down while the problems increase and the union movement becomes just another anachronism on the road to corporate utopia.