WASHINGTON-Organized labor wants to make inroads in the wireless telecommunications industry as part of a broad makeover to regain political clout that has been waning for the past two decades.
“It’s a major priority,” said Jeffery Miller, a spokesman for the Communications Workers of America.
But Miller concedes unions, which have a strong presence in a landline telephone industry that has experienced massive layoffs in recent years, are a tough sell in the digital age.
“In most cases, as (telephone) companies get into new businesses, like cellular, they have not automatically extended union recognition,” said Miller.
Today, most wireless workers are not union members and companies like it that way.
“We feel we don’t need a union and a union slows us down,” said Jim Gerace, a spokesman for Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile. But he said employees should be able to choose whether to join unions.
Later next month, a National Labor Relations Board will hold a hearing on CWA’s charge that Bell Atlantic Nynex engaged in unlawful labor practices by failing to honor the union contracts of 150 Nynex employees when the wireless units of Bell Atlantic and Nynex merged last year.
The NLRB made a preliminary find in late July that CWA’s complaint had merit.
Fifty CWA workers are cell site technicians in New York and the other 100 are technicians and sales agents in New England, represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
CWA President Morton Bahr welcomed the NLRB ruling and suggested the dispute may signal how the telecommunications industry will deal with labor in a future that promises more consolidation as deregulatory and competitive forces of the new telecommunications law take command of the marketplace.
“The labor board has strongly backed CWA’s position and the companies must now decide whether to do the right thing and recognize their legal and moral obligation to these workers, or else to continue fighting us by dragging this case out,” said Bahr in reaction to the NLRB action.
“Their response will either help alleviate or else heighten our members’ concerns over the impact on an alliance if the proposed Bell Atlantic Nynex merger is allowed to take place,” he added. The proposed $23 billion deal between the two parent firms is still pending.
CWA’s Miller said union members of SBC Communications Inc.’s wireless unit have not met the same hostility. SBC and Pacific Telesis Group plan to partner in what is becoming a trend among the Baby Bells. The SBC-PacTel deal is worth nearly $23.8 billion.
The AFL-CIO, the umbrella organization for CWA, IBEW and other unions, has called for a boycott of Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile, which provides wireless telephony from Maine to Virginia.
It’s likely that alternative cellular carriers in that stretch of markets along the East Coast are not unionized.
But though union representation is skimpy in wireless today, the battle with Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile could be the beginning of something bigger.
The AFL-CIO, under the new leadership of John Sweeney, is making a comeback of revolutionary dimension. The federation has organized a grass roots effort to recruit younger members and re-energize the labor movement in the United States. The immediate goal is to help Democrats win back control of the House and Senate in November and to keep Bill Clinton in the White House.
Sweeney, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention and has a new book on labor’s future, is throwing $35 million to blast Republicans in political ads.
But organized labor cannot depend on the kind of solid Democratic support that linked the two in the past. While Clinton signed the bill raising the minimum wage to labor’s delight, his signing of welfare reform legislation and embrace of free trade make labor nervous.
