Telecom Companies Should Retrain Workers Affected by Tech Change, ex-CWA President Says

The union takes a similar position on E-rate, and has had its share of both successes and setbacks dealing with cable operators, telcos and carriers in recent years, a CWA spokeswoman told us. Hurdles include Deutsche Telekom, which has “respect for worker rights” in its home country of Germany, and is not showing that at its T-Mobile unit in the U.S., she said. Cablevision is among the cable operators that haven’t “been supportive of worker’s rights,” she said. Representatives of AT&T, those companies and some of their associations had no comment by our deadline.

Connecting schools with faster broadband service should be a focus, because speeds have lagged in this country, said Bahr after a luncheon retrospective of his career and the role Judaism played in it at Temple Micah in Washington on Wednesday (http://bit.ly/19iziGR). “The schools I think are the priority,” he said. “We're trailing” other countries, he told us. “We have to catch up.” Bahr said he thinks USF spending for residential broadband may deserve to be a lower priority than serving schools. CWA supports “changes to the USF to build out high speed broadband,” said the union’s spokeswoman. “Also, we support the FCC on the E-rate changes.” Commissioners voted last month to approve an NPRM on E-rate (CD July 22 p1).

What made “the telephone companies great competitors” was a deal in 1986 between the union and AT&T to fund education of employees in an alliance between the two entities, Bahr said. “This changed the dynamics. Companies began to realize, the higher the educational level, the easier it is for people to adapt to change.” Those who participated in such programs were thankful to the company and union for paying for their education, wanted to remain with their employer and often sought more schooling, said Bahr. He noted he was succeeded by Larry Cohen, who Bahr said is one of the few Jewish union leaders. But “we are represented through the ranks” including in the “middle management” of unions, said Bahr.

Having to adapt to technological changes isn’t new for CWA, its members and their companies, said Bahr. He pointed to the move away from rotary-dial phone calls. The union had decided to embrace new technology “on the condition that whatever company was putting it in would retrain our members to do that work. It was a simple matter” before the Bell System was broken up in 1984, said Bahr. Before then, “when new technology came in, the Bell Laboratories usually developed it, and could implement it in a humane way,” he said. Post-breakup of AT&T, the industry was “open to global competition, it changed, so in order to be relevant ... I realized that no longer were these companies able to take people off the job for six months and train them in new technology, because someone else would beat them to the punch.” Bahr said he and AT&T took a page from automakers’ playbook in devising education programs.

"Bad companies get what they deserve -- they help make unions,” said Bahr about six decades of experience with unions and the job protections they offer. “Of the major telecoms, AT&T has been the most positive” on workers’ rights, said the CWA spokeswoman. In 1985, CWA started working with Southwestern Bell Mobile workers, which continued in various corporate iterations of AT&T, she said. Voting for a union at Cablevision “involves a major fight,” she said. The spokeswoman cited the approximately 280 Brooklyn, N.Y., technicians who didn’t get the same raises given to colleagues in the Bronx after the Brooklyn workers voted last year to be represented by CWA. The National Labor Relations Board regional office (CD June 3 p9) “filed charges and a hearing will finally begin in September,” she said.

CWA’s longstanding forte is “confronting new technologies that lead to job loss,” said a labor-relations professor who has presented papers about that union to the organization and hasn’t worked for it. The “history of the telecommunications industry” since the last century has been “the jobs regularly changed” because of technological developments, said Rosemary Batt of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School in an interview. That includes phone operators, she said. Bahr had mentioned that the union had to integrate telegraph operators, of which he was once one, and telephone operators some decades ago. “We were the first non-telephone workers to come into the union,” he said in the speech. “They didn’t know what to call us, so they called us non-voice,” Bahr said to laughter. “We became the non-voice sector of the union."

Newer technological challenges for union members include the outsourcing of call centers to contractors that run them for a wide range of companies and not just the telecom industry, and dealing with the realities of a staff who have jobs that often have both a sales and customer-service element, said Batt. “The union has always had a strong, positive approach in negotiating with the companies to accept the new technologies and to retrain workers.” CWA “has been extraordinary in really understanding” implications of new technology, deregulation of the industry and globalization and getting members educated, said Batt. “The challenge has been new technologies that are labor-displacing,” she said. Also “a real challenge” for the organization, where it’s had “limited success,” is with call center outsourcing, she said. “Call centers are so mobile. They can be shut down at the drop of a pin and moved somewhere else.”