Leon Lazaroff

Like most workers at Kaiser Corp.’s plant in Gramercy, Louisiana, Ray Scroggs never thought he’d still be out of work 20 months after talks between his union, the United of America, and company management broke down over job security and retiree health coverage.

Since October 1998, Scroggs and his USWA local have joined 2,900 workers at Kaiser plants in Spokane and Tacoma, Washington, and Newark, Ohio, to resist management demands that the company be allowed to “contract-out” 700 union jobs and put a Steelworkers Face Off Against Kaisercap on health care benefits.

Driving along a hot asphalt road in the neighboring town of Lutcher, Scroggs points to a spot about a half-mile from the Kaiser plant where a half-ton section of a chemical tank was found after a massive explosion on July 5, 1999. The blast splattered shards of metals over the plant’s property and spewed asbestos and lye into nearby communities.

No one was killed in the 5:15 AM explosion but 29 workers were evacuated to a nearby hospital with broken bones and burns caused by the boiling lye. If the explosion had taken place a few hours later, after the daily 6:00 AM shift change, Scroggs says the consequences could have been far worse.

At the time of the blast, replacement workers, or what many here call “scabs,” were operating the 42-year-old facility. According to company documents, a power outage was mishandled. The unionized steelworkers who had helped turn a nearly bankrupt 1980s facility into a 1997 money-maker, could only watch as ambulances raced in and out of the plant’s grounds, and area residents complained of burning eyes and throats.

“I’m confident that if we’d been in there at that time, the explosion never would have happened,” Scroggs said. “We’ve
had a number of power failures, and we never blew up the plant before.”
The union’s argument that the explosion would not have occurred if the
plant’s regular workers had been at the controls was validated on March
16 when the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration
(MSHA) cited Kaiser for 23 safety violations, and asked a federal judge to
fine the company $533,000

Though the company is challenging both actions in court with the help of the
Washington, DC firm of Patton Boggs LLP, MSHA’s report, which read more
like an indictment, was explicit. The report stated that “because of
the inexperience of the employees on site at the time of the power failure
and the employees’ lack of training in procedures to be followed in the
event of a power failure, they were unable to take timely action to prevent
the explosion.”

More damning, the Labor Department announced a week later that it would consider
making a request to the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation
into the blast. Kaiser called the ongoing probe unnecessary. A class action
lawsuit has also been filed against the company on behalf of more than 5,000
local residents.

To Scroggs’ relief, Kaiser announced in March that it would allocate
$198 million to rebuild the Gramercy refinery. The company expects the plant
to be operational by early 2001. (Insurance is expected to cover 50 to 80
percent of the rebuilding cost.) All of that was good news, says Scroggs,
provided that the lock-out ends, and Kaiser’s USWA workers can go back
to work.

Unlike Kaiser’s manufacturing facilities in Washington state and Ohio,
the Gramercy complex is more like a chemical plant. Three times a week, shipments
of bauxite arrive from the Kaiser Jamaica Bauxite Company, a facility owned
49 percent by Kaiser Aluminum and 51 percent by the Government of Jamaica.
The bauxite is then combined under intense pressure and searing heat with
a caustic potash to form a liquor which later becomes alumina, the material
used to make aluminum. Kaiser, which also owns plants in Ghana and Wales,
is the world’s second largest producer of alumina.

The explosion had put Gramercy’s refinery on the map. While local and
even national media started coming to Gramercy, the blast tore at Scroggs’s
spirit. His wife told him that following the explosion he became withdrawn,
afraid that Kaiser would use the accident as an excuse to leave Gramercy.

The shores of the Mississippi south of Baton Rouge are home to a Fortune 500
collection of corporations: Dow Chemical, Exxon, Mobil, and Dupont, to name
just a few. Kaiser workers, though, are the second lowest paid industrial
employees in the region, says the union. Pressing for better wages is made
more difficult because Louisiana is a right-to-work state.

A 19-year electrician and father of four, Scroggs shows up twice a week for
his 12-hour shift on the steelworker’s picket line outside the Kaiser’s
alumina refinery, an hour’s ride from New Orleans. It’s a big change,
he says, from showing up to work. “Even if I lose my job, even if I never
return to Kaiser, all of this is worth it,” says Scroggs. “It’s
all about corporate greed. All of this is necessary to show that we won’t
be victims of people like Charles Hurwitz.”

Hurwitz is the billionaire corporate raider who bought Kaiser in a hostile
takeover in 1988. The son of an affluent haberdasher from the East Texas outpost
of Kilgore, Hurwitz has been the target of a 15-year campaign by environmentalists
to stop Hurwitz’s Pacific Lumber Co. from clear-cutting old-growth redwoods
in the Headwaters Forest in Northern California. Hurwitz acquired the timber
company in 1985 with the help of the soon-to-be convicted junk bond specialist
Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Hurwitz is also the target of several lawsuits filed by the Office of Thrift
Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seeking to recover
up to $810 million for a series of risky investments that led to the failure
of United Savings of Texas. Hurwitz denies he had anything to do with the
S&L’s bankruptcy.

At the picketline, Rudolph Mitchell, a 27-year belt operator, exclaims that
Hurwitz couldn’t be any more different than the man who once owned Kaiser
Aluminum, the legendary industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. “You felt like
coming to work when Henry J. Kaiser owned this company,” says Mitchell.
“We were the highest paid employees on the river. It was teamwork, it
was family. You just got a raise. It was automatic.”

When Kaiser died in 1967 at the age of 85, he passed his company, then known
as Kaiser Tech, to family members who continued to operate it much as he had.
By the mid-1980s, Kaiser was owned by an English investor named Alan Clore.
Burdened by low aluminum prices, Kaiser turned
to the USWA for concessions. The union agreed to wage cuts and other give-backs
with the understanding that when the company’s fortunes turned around,
they would be rewarded.

The new management, though, made a nearly fatal mistake predicting that aluminum
prices would recover when in fact they would fall to historic lows. While
Kaiser’s rivals, Alcoa Inc. and Reynolds Metals Co., laid off workers
and stayed clear of debt, the company did just the opposite.

Following the 1987 stock market crash, Kaiser’s stock was weak and management
was indecisive. Sensing a buying opportunity, Hurwitz seized Kaiser’s
shares, adding another piece to his Houston-based holding company Maxxam Inc.
To pay off his junk bonds, Hurwitz sold off some of Kaiser’s chemical
plants, and began trimming the workforce. Since 1980, Kaiser’s workforce
has fallen from 4,948 employees to 2,920 as of 1998.

Kaiser CEO Raymond J. Milchovich insists that further cuts are needed to make
Kaiser competitive with Pittsburgh-based Alcoa, which is nearing the close
of its $6.3 billion acquisition of Reynolds, further concentrating an industry
in which Alcoa was already the world’s largest aluminum maker.

While the numbers have changed throughout the 20-month labor dispute, Kaiser’s
most recent proposal would eliminate 450 union jobs through what it calls
“changes in work rule flexi- bilities,” or combining job descriptions.
Another 240 union jobs would be removed by “contracting-out” work
to lower-paid non-union employees not eligible to receive company benefits.
Kaiser spokesperson Lamb says the company has to rid its payroll of featherbedding.

The USWA’s John Duray who works in the union’s Pittsburgh office,
calls the featherbedding allegation an excuse to eliminate union jobs with
an established wage scale, health care, and pension benefits.“What the
members are opposed to is making sacrifice for years if not decades, only
to be told that your job is going to someone else,” Duray said. “You
can always have fewer workers, but at some point you are talking about safety
and efficiency. Look what happened in Gramercy.”

When the USWA and Kaiser management sat down for talks in Minneapolis in September
1998, Burnell says the union realized something was unusual when Kaiser presented
five different labor agreements, one for each of its plants, in place of the
usual master contract. (Spokane is home to two Kaiser facilities, the Mead
smelter and the Trentwood rolling mill).

It appeared, Burnell says, that Kaiser and Hurwitz wanted to significantly
weaken the union. “Demanding separate agreements is illegal if the union
doesn’t want to do it,” Burnell says. “But they wouldn’t
budge.”

On the issue of wages, Kaiser remained unwilling to raise salaries comparable
to those paid by Alcoa and Reynolds, the industry leaders. More importantly
for those in Gramercy, Kaiser refused to match salaries paid to skilled industrial
workers at other Mississippi River factories.

With the two sides deadlocked and the master contract due to expire on September
30, USWA president George Becker and David Foster, the lead negotiator on
the Kaiser strike and the head of the union’s District 11 in Minneapolis,
flew to Washington D.C. to meet directly with outgoing Kaiser CEO George Haymaker,
and his eventual replacement, Milchovich. Once again, no agreement could be
found.

Seeing no alternative, the USWA went out on strike the next day. Quietly,
the union was hoping for a repeat of a 1995 action when Kaiser workers at
all five domestic plants and workers at Kaiser’s Jamaican facility struck
for five days before the company agreed to a new three-year contract. Maxxam
says the strike cost them $17 million.

But this time, Kaiser was prepared for a more prolonged face-off. During the
fall of 1998, the two sides finally met face-to-face in San Francisco on December
17. It was at that meeting that Milchovich unveiled a 2,000-page proposal
that grouped workers according to “skill-sets,” awarding higher
wages to better skilled workers. Wage rates, though, were not specified for
about one-third of the workers. “That proposal was a giant leap backward.
A dreadful proposal,” Burnell says.

Curiously, Kaiser’s chief negotiator, David Pryzbylski, who had been
hired as a consultant, resigned, later telling union officials that he didn’t
see the groundwork for a viable compromise. Pryzby- lski, who now works for
Beta Steel in Portage, Indiana declined to comment on the negotiations.

To replace Pryzbylski, Kaiser brought in Jeremy Sherman, a corporate specialist
with the Chicago law firm of Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson,
whose co-founder Lee C. Shaw, helped draft the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act
of 1947. Sherman told the USWA’s chief negotiator Foster that the union
should expect punitive actions if it did not settle. The union took the comments
as a threat to hire permanent replacements. At a January 13, 1999 meeting
in Chicago, the union acquiesced, offering to end the strike and resume work
on the previous contract provided that the company would continue talking.

Kaiser refused. Instead, it presented the giant proposal as a “take-it
or leave” offer. Without an agreement, the company began its lock-out
on January 14. Following the lock-out, Kaiser management accused the union
of intransigence in the face of an increasingly competitive global aluminum
market. Burnell countered that Kaiser was bargaining in bad faith.

Nearly 15 months later, the union’s case was backed up when the General
Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board ruled on April 26 that Kaiser
had failed to openly negotiate family and medical leave policies, pension
plans, job-assignments, and salaries.

The company’s contract proposal, wrote Leonard R. Page, the NLRB’s
General Counsel, “lacked sufficient specificity to make it capable of
acceptance by the Union.” The case has since been referred to an NLRB
administrative judge. If Kaiser loses, the union would be eligible to receive
full back pay and benefits worth about $270 million.

Kaiser, meanwhile, is losing money. Revenues in 1999 fell 9 percent to $2.04
billion, while losses totaled $54.1 million. In the past year, the company’s
stock price has fallen 58 percent, closing the month of April at $4.25 a share.
Kaiser spokesperson Scott Lamb dismissed the NLRB ruling. “Until the
full process is completed, no one should prejudge the company on those charges,”
Lamb said. “There is nothing in there about guilt; nothing improper was
done.”

In Washington, DC, Burnell greeted the NLRB’s decision with controlled
elation. Although the board’s decision validated the USWA’s complaints,
Burnell stressed that the case could be bogged down in the board’s bureaucracy
for a very long time. Another round of talks is scheduled in May at which
time the union plans to push a 5-year proposal that it says would boost productivity
and save the company $10 million in annual labor costs.

Back in Gramercy, Scroggs remained cautious. “With Hurwitz, he wants
more money because the economy is global, and he thinks he needs more money
from us to compete,” Scroggs says. “Well, we’re down here in
the U.S. economy just trying to stay alive. All I’m lookin’ for
is to be just below the middle-class. That’s all I’m lookin’
for.”

Two of America’s largest meatpackers have been charged with smuggling undocumented workers into the U.S., and unions and immigrant advocates say the cases reflect a concerted effort by U.S. companies to lure workers from Mexico and Central America to low-wage jobs in the United States.

In April, a federal judge dismissed charges that Nebraska Beef company officials had set up recruiting and transportation networks that moved undocumented workers, mostly Mexicans and Central Americans, north of the border and furnished them with false documentation.

While the Justice Department pursues an appeal in the Nebraska Beef case, it has launched a similar case against Tyson Foods, the country’s largest poultry producer and owner of IBP, the historically anti-union meatpacking giant. That trial is expected to begin next February.

Unions and immigration activists say both cases are evidence that meat and poultry producers habitually recruit undocumented workers to fill the industry’s dirty, dangerous and low-paying jobs. These critics say Tyson and Nebraska Beef were, not aberrations, but natural products of an immigration system that makes it illegal to hire undocumented workers, and a labor system that uses those same workers to depress wages. “This is how labor shortfalls are met and continue to be met in the meatpacking industry,” says Milo Mumgaard, executive director of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest.

The Nebraska Beef and Tyson smuggling cases could offer an alternative to the conventional portrait of undocumented immigrants evading border patrols to take jobs away from American citizens. A more accurate picture, says Greg Denier of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), would highlight the ways U.S. companies encourage and often pay hiring agents and transportation companies on the border to publicize—through radio advertisements, leaflets and local newspapers—the availability of U.S. jobs.

Once potential laborers come forward, smuggling rings tap into the racket for fake birth certificates and Social Security cards, furnishing workers with the documentation they need to land a slaughterhouse job. “This is not a situation of workers sitting on the other side of the border looking to come and take American jobs,” Denier says. “These workers are lured here with false promises and high hopes.”

Because of their history as migrant farmworkers, advocates say, Mexicans and Central Americans have been targeted to fill jobs that suffer from high turnover rates. “Very few human beings want to pull chicken guts or hack cow carcasses for minimum wage,” says Leone Jose Bicchieri, an organizer for the Chicago-based National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice.

But the Nebraska Beef case didn’t end up helping workers . The case stemmed from a December 2000 INS raid on the company’s Omaha factory, in which the agency arrested more than 200 immigrants and then deported them, mostly to Mexico. In a strange twist for union and immigration activists, a federal judge threw out the case on grounds the deportation made it impossible for the company to call workers who might have testified that Nebraska Beef officials did not recruit them or provide them with false documents.

But while the mass arrest initially troubled area workers, it also helped galvanize a coalition of 53 local organizations, called Omaha Together One Community, into organizing at Nebraska’s giant meatpacking plants. Says Lourdes Gouveia, director of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, “It took a community-based group to inject new life into local organizing and to dispel the stereotype, even within the union itself, that immigrant workers were unorganizable.”

In early May, the UFCW won its largest area victory to date, signing up workers at the Northern States Beef plant in Omaha, owned by ConAgra. Next up is forcing Nebraska Beef to hold a similar election. Earlier this year, the National Labor Relations Board upheld UFCW’s charge that it lost an election at Nebraska Beef in August 2001 because the company trucked in workers from other plants, telling them to vote against the union or risk being fired.

As Tyson undergoes investigation, advocates say meatpackers have become more careful about their hiring practices. Still, Gouveia says all of the slaughterhouses have strategies in place to assess their needs. “They have a certain profile in mind,” she says, “and they go after it.”

Not surprisingly, labor shortages routinely occur after immigrants begin to shun these jobs, fed up with the nasty and painful work. “What’s been missing in all of this is a discussion of what has led to the creation of an economy that has such a need for an undocumented work force,” says Joe Berra, a staff attorney for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “What really needs to be addressed is our immigration policy on one hand, and workers rights on the other.”

The extraordinary thing about the August telephone workers strike against
Verizon Communications was that 87,000 operators and line technicians refused
to work for 18 days not over the pocketbook issues of wages and benefits,
but over the opportunity to greatly increase the chances of organizing
the company’s non-union wireless workers.

This strike was about the future composition of the union following the
$65 billion merger between Bell Atlantic Corporation and GTE Corporation
that gave birth this summer to Verizon Communications. The Communications
Workers of America (CWA) and the smaller International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers saw the merger as a critical make or break point in the life of
organized labor in the telecom industry.

Although union jobs comprise about 53 percent of Verizon’s total workforce
of 250,000, most of these positions lie in the company’s traditional fixed-line
telephone business. The new jobs, the jobs tied to wireless and broadband
communications, are found in Verizon Wireless. But of these positions,
about 30,000 and growing, only 50 are unionized. CWA leadership saw this
strike as a chance to target Verizon’s expanding wireless operations. Conversely,
company management hoped to curtail union attempts to bring Verizon Wireless
employees into the fold. For the past few years, Verizon has watched as
AT&T has clamped down on union efforts to organize more of its employees,
currently about 25 percent of the company’s total workforce. The CWA charges
that AT&T regularly violates a 1998 neutrality agreement that calls for
the company to remain impartial while the two unions attempt to organize
AT&T’s non-union employees, once again a group that includes AT&T’s flourishing
wireless division.

The new Verizon is the largest local telephone company in the country with
annual revenues expected to top $65 billion for 2000. Verizon’s cellular
telephone subsidiary, Verizon Wireless, is the largest cellular provider.
(AT&T remains the country’s largest long-distance company).

Entering into negotiations with Verizon, the CWA and the IBEW decided that
rather than attempt to obstruct the advance of new technologies, or defiantly
guard the job security of its current membership—as unions have notoriously
done in the past—the two telecommunications unions focused on securing
a streamlined method for signing up new workers known as the card-check
procedure. (The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Workers (HERE) have used
the card-check process to successfully organize many of the largest hotels
in Las Vegas.)

A relatively new phenomenon in labor organizing, the card-check allows
workers to become union members if a majority of employees at a particular
worksite sign a card indicating that they want to join. The procedure circumvents
the tedious and often losing process of trying to win union recognition
through the slow and overburdened National Labor Relations Board. (The
NLRB acknowledges that one out of every ten workers who tries to organize
is fired; the board has a backlog of 25,000 cases.)

The CWA first won a card- check agreement at SBC Communications in 1996.
Since then, the union increased the percentage of unionized employees at
SBC to 63 percent or 129,600 of 204,500 total workers, giving it the highest
percentage of union employees of any major telecommunications company in
the industry.

Although the CWA and the IBEW would eventually win a 12 percent pay raise
over three years at Verizon, the focus of the negotiations held in Washington
DC was on winning a card-check agreement, something the union had failed
to do two years earlier during a much shorter strike.

The decision to concentrate on future organizing rather than wages and
benefits was a critical break with the past, observed Tom Juravich, director
of the Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. “This victory was an indication of labor’s strategic approach
to organizing,” he said. “We’re not seeing those long drawn out battles
we saw in the 1980s, simply because unions are being a lot wiser. Instead
of striking all the time, and losing, they are being a lot more strategic.”

On the public relations front, the union, representing workers in 11 states
from Maine to Virginia, had the good luck of going out on strike just as
Verizon was launching a multimillion advertising campaign to publicize
the Bell Atlantic-GTE merger. Featuring the omnipresent baritone of actor
James Earl Jones, the ads coached viewers learn how to pronounce the new
name—Ver-EYE-zon —and explain its origin: a combination of horizon and
veritas, the Latin word for truth.

Although company officials insisted that the strike had not taken the punch
out of its advertising campaign, union negotiators felt as though their
position was strengthened by Verizon’s desire not to let the hundreds of
unrepaired phone lines and unattended service orders that had built up
during the walkout sully its new corporate image. “That was a stroke of
strategizing genius,” added Juravich.

At the rank-and-file level, the focus was on winning card-check. Over the
course of the past year, the CWA held a series of educational workshops
to convey to members that although the economy was comparatively strong
and that the Bell Atlantic contract prohibited the company from laying-off
or transferring any worker, the future did not look bright.

The merger with GTE was fast adding jobs to its non-union Cellular and
Internet services subsidiary Verizon Wireless while growth in Verizon’s
fixed-wireline business, or to use industry jargon, Plain Old Telephone
Service (POTS), had been nearly flat. Bob Master, political director of
the CWA’s New York office, recounts that the union took great pains to
emphasize to its members that the Bell Atlantic-GTE merger would likely
accelerate the company’s practice of outsourcing and moving newly created
jobs to non-union areas of the country and the company. Unless steps were
made to organize its cellular subsidiary Verizon Wireless—owned 55 percent
by Verizon and 45 percent by Britain’s Vodafone plc—union members would
see a weakening in their wages and benefits if not the gradual elimination
of their jobs.

“We’re at this moment of transition in the telecommunications industry,”
said Master. “We’re saying that the union has to be a part of the future
here, and that includes wireless, Internet services, high-speed digital
lines, cable-TV—all the stuff that is developing out of the convergence
of telecommunications services.”

Prior to the strike, just 50 out of Verizon Wireless’ 30,000 workers were
organized, the result of a small group of technicians that Bell Atlantic
needed in the mid-1980s when it began its cellular build-up. (Just two
years ago, Bell Atlantic’s wireless operations counted just 7,100 employees.)

To convince workers to go on strike for an issue that did not directly
impact their jobs was seen as a test of leadership’s connection to its
rank-and-file. Master says the union’s directors debated amongst themselves
for over a year about whether the membership could be convinced to strike
in order to win a card-check agreement. “This was a posed as crucial test
of our ability to grow along with the company,” Master adds.

At issue was the future of the telecommunications industry, and what role,
if any, organized labor would play in it. For unions, the cold reality
was that as wireless, Internet, and broadband industries have grown in
the last 15 to 20 years, unions have been slow to organize them. “While
wireless are growing, voice-telephone businesses are either steady or shrinking.
The unions have to go to where the dues paying membership is—it’s a matter
of survival,” observed AT&T spokesperson Burke Stinson.

If they weren’t obvious before the strike, two themes became preeminent
as a result of the walkout: first, that demand for wireless and cellular
services has unequivocally changed the business priorities of the major
telecommunications companies; and secondly, that a decade of multi-billion
dollar mergers had reshaped the companies themselves.

Like all seven former Baby Bells, Verizon grew out of the 1984 break-up
of AT&T Corp. The Supreme Court anti-trust decision broke the telecom monopoly
into seven companies, among them NYNEX and Bell Atlantic. In 1997, those
two companies merged. That consolidation led to others. SBC Communications
bought Pacific Telesis Group, the parent of Pacific Bell, in 1997 for $23.5
billion, and then two years later completed a $62 billion deal for Ameritech
Corp., the former Chicago-based Baby Bell that served much of the Midwest.
(At the time, SBC’s acquisition of Ameritech was the largest telecom deal
ever, since then eclipsed by Verizon’s purchase of GTE).

The merger list goes on. In April, the three-year old broadband Internet
provider, Qwest Communications International Inc., completed its acquisition
of another former Baby Bell, Denver-based US West Corp., for $47.5 billion.
Foreign telecom companies are also getting into the mix, an act of reciprocity
for the many years of U.S. telecom purchases abroad. In July, Deutsche
Telekom announced plans to buy the cellular provider VoiceStream Wireless
Corp. for $50.3 billion, and in August Japan’s NTT Communications, completed
its $5 billion purchase of the U.S. Internet server, Verio Inc.

In many cases, older telecom companies with unionized work- forces have
purchased non-union newer companies. And with each merger, the unionized
companies have tried to leverage the increase in employees to dilute the
union’s presence and influence.

Verizon’s purchase of GTE was such a case. “The slew of mergers and acquisitions
have clearly awoken workers to the realization that although the economy
may be good for the moment, another round of corporate mergers, and job
elimination is likely,” said UMass’ Juravich. In early-September, Qwest
announced it would eliminate more than 13,000 jobs as part of its acquisition
of US West.

Verizon’s union contract forbids layoffs, a reality that came as a some
surprise to those in the press. In fact, the decision by the CWA and IBEW
to strike against Verizon was greeted by some in the press as the curious grumb- lings of workers that had chosen not to embrace the potential of
the so-called New Economy.

The Industry Standard declared in its August 14 issue that “a labor dispute
might seem out of place in the Internet Economy, where most employers worry
more about filling jobs than about fending off union organizers.” A leading
voice of the Internet business community, the magazine added that “despite
the booming economy, unionized workers are concerned they’re being denied
their piece of the new-economy pie.”

Prior to the start of the strike, the New York Times portrayed the conflict
as one that “pits old-line labor against the New Economy.” After an accord
was reached, the newspaper seemed obliged to acknowledge that “organized
labor still has a place in the New Economy.”

All the talk of New Economy versus Old Economy riled CWA organizer Steve
Early. The newer jobs in the communications industry, he argued, are much
the same as the old ones. They both require a sales force, technicians,
and maintenance personnel.

“The only thing that distinguishes the workers in this so-called New Economy
is the fact that the new workforce in the new economy side is treated shabbily,”
he said. “The people have no rights, they have no grievance procedure,
they have minimal benefit coverage compared to the traditional benefit
package. They don’t have guaranteed across-the- board increases, they don’t
have any number of things that are standard parts of a contract that’s
been built up over 30 or 40 years bargaining. And the working conditions
don’t smack of anything new. They smack of the conditions that existed
in factories before the eight-hour-day and the 40-hour-week was won.”

Indeed much of the telecommunications industry remains unorganized. Around
the Washington DC offices of the Communications Workers of America, Debbie
Goldman and her co-workers among the union’s research staff refer to a
particularly bad moment in the CWA’s recent organizing history as the “Christmas
Massacre.”

That was the day back in 1987 when officials of the long-distance telephone
company MCI Corp. fired a couple of hundred workers at a call center outside
of Detroit which was in the beginning stages of a union drive. “They plain
fired everybody,” Goldman recalled. “Just a few days before Christmas.”

The CWA had a similar experience with Sprint Corp. in 1994 after working
with a group of employees at one of its San Francisco telemarketing centers
geared specifically to Spanish speaking customers. One week before the
company had agreed to hold an NLRB election on union representation, the
employees were told by Sprint that the center was being shut down, and
that the workers were out of job.

This time, however, the union filed a grievance with the NLRB which in
typical fashion dragged on for nearly four years until the board cited
Sprint for more than 50 labor law violations that included intimidation,
using employees to disseminate information, and threatening to fire employees.
“That’s the pattern of those two companies,” Goldman added. “They will
aggressively fight and even break the law in order to keep a union out
and they’ve been very successful as a result. So we have made very little
inroads.”

A Sprint spokesperson, Mark Bonavia, said company employees have chosen
not to unionize because they are largely pleased with working conditions.
“People unionize because they’re getting crappy benefits,” he said. “We
offer our employees good benefits and wage packages; then again, if they
want to unionize they can, we won’t stand in the way.”

Today, unionized employees at Sprint comprise just 12.5 percent of its
77,600 employees. WorldCom, which purchased MCI in 1998, has managed to
block any and all union organizing campaigns. Not surprisingly, WorldCom
chose Sprint for a merger partner in a $129 billion deal that regulators
shot down in June on anti-trust grounds.

At Verizon, the card-check agreement does not go into effect for six months.
As a result, the company, says Master, has begun a campaign to press its
non-union wireless workers to resist the approaches of union organizers.
AT&T is doing the same at its call stations in the south and southwest.
Company spokesman Steven Marcus said Verizon is committed to abiding by
the contract.

The CWA, meanwhile, is gearing up for a largescale organizing blitz for
the winter and spring. The first target is Verizon’s wireless workers,
and later, GTE’s non-unionized employees. Further afield, the union would
like to bring former Ameritech workers, now employed by SBC, into the union.

“We’re going to have to go out and win the same kind of card check and
neutrality agreement that we have for wireless in the rest of the former
GTE areas as those contracts come up in the next few years,” Early said.
“Ultimately, we need a national contract, and we can only get there by
organizing the unorganized in wireless.”