Skip to main content

News

Search News

Topics
Date Published Between

For the Media

For media inquiries, call CWA Communications at 202-434-1168 or email comms@cwa-union.org. To read about CWA Members, Leadership or Industries, visit our About page.

SIF: Health Care/Employee Free Choice: "We Couldn't Have Done it Without the SIF"

CWAers call for health care reform now.CWA’s Strategic Industry Fund for Health Care Reform made a critical difference in the fight for health care reform, say members who worked on the campaign.

CWAers played a key role in drastically reducing the effect of the proposed excise tax on our members’ plans and in winning help for early retirees. Without CWA’s activism, many of our members’ plans would be at risk. Through the SIF campaign, thousands of CWAers talked about the need for real reform at their workplaces, wrote letters, made phone calls, attended town hall meetings and visited members of Congress to make sure the message got through.

CWAers told their senators and representatives how they worried about skyrocketing health care costs and whether they would be able to maintain their health care benefits.

Members talked about how being laid off meant losing affordable health care and retired workers wondered how they would pay sky-high premiums until they were eligible for Medicare, or how they would afford their prescription drugs when they reached the “donut” hole in Medicare’s drug coverage.

“We couldn’t have done it without the SIF,” said Mike Carmel, a chief steward at CWA Local 1118 in Albany, N.Y. “It was monumentally important. At the local level, a lot of us don’t have a budget to cover someone to handle national issues. The SIF allowed me and my co-coordinator to be freed up to make member contacts on the worksite and off.”

Those personal contacts were critical because “the information was coming from someone they work with and I hope they trust,” Carmel said.

Over the more than two-year campaign, CWA members made more than 50,000 phone calls to their members of Congress about health care. They wrote some 10,000 letters and scheduled hundreds of meetings with members of Congress and staff, both in home offices and in Washington, D.C.           

CWA District coordinators held several training sessions for local activists who went on to train members back home. In California, Local 9400 had 30 people, and sometimes more, working long days on health care. “These were not eight-hour days,” Local 9400 Executive Vice President Judy Perez said. “They were so passionate about their work. They put in a multitude of hours that were never covered, evenings, and before shifts, never having a lunch hour or break. I was so proud of them.”

Then, armed with the facts from local coordinators and a toll-free telephone line, CWA members made calls from their worksites to make sure their members of Congress knew how important it was to finally gain real health care reform.

Without the SIF, “we couldn’t have had members come to Capitol Hill for one-on-one congressional meetings, because people simply couldn’t afford to take the time off from work,” said Valeria Castle-Stanley, legislative-political coordinator for Local 2204 in southern Virginia.