Big Organizing Wins In 3 CWA Districts

Expanding CWA's base in wireless telephony and higher education, and grabbing a piece of AT&T's directory assistance service, local organizers have been busy signing up nearly 1,000 new members and laying the ground work for several hundred more.
Several District 6 locals combined efforts to bring in, on cardcheck, 300 workers at four new units of South-western Bell Wireless, with four additional units - 216 workers - awaiting certification by the American Arbitration Association.

Another 300 clerical and administrative employees of the Community Colleges of Baltimore (Md.) await formal recognition by the colleges' board of trustees, following their successful campaign, conducted with Local 2101, CWA District 2 and CWA's public workers department.

And, after a denial of cardcheck recognition, directory assistance operators in Augusta, Ga, delivered for District 3 a unit of 361 on a National Labor Relations Board election vote of 217-56.

"Credit is due everyone from rank-and-file members who kept up one-on-one contact, to the district and department vice presidents and staff who backed these campaigns, to some courageous inside organizers who refused to be intimidated or dissuaded by management, " said CWA President Morton Bahr. "Through both cardcheck and the traditional NLRB election process, we are building an organizing culture that will strengthen our position in bargaining now and in years to come."

Wall-to-Wall Wireless
District 6 Organizing Coordinator Sandy Rusher hailed the efforts of a number of CWA locals that signed up four new units of SWB Wireless, bringing the total to six since District 6 Vice President Ben Turn Jr. negotiated cardcheck for all Southwestern Bell companies last year.

"Almost all of these are places we've been working for a number of years," said Rusher. "In some cases, we've had people fired, it was so hostile. Now, with cardcheck, it's completely different. Basically, there's been neutrality. And locals now are more willing to reach out to people."

Local 6327 obtained cards from outside cellular techs, installation techs, inside sales and customer service reps at eight SWB Wireless locations and from retail sales reps at Walmart kiosks in Kansas City, Mo.

Don Penny, Local 6327 president, said local organizer A.J. Viegas, Steward Sandy Molleson, Vice President Debbie Van Tassell and others went out and handbilled the locations, set up meetings and discussed what it means to be a union. Rusher said Steward B.J. Payne from SWB Wireless in Abilene, Tex., also spoke to the Kansas City workers.

"They were very instrumental in getting cards signed that way. Personal contact was the key," said Penny. "I think it's a great victory for CWA, and I think it's a great victory for the Wireless members."

Other new units recognized are Midland/Odessa, Tex, 34 workers; Lawrence, Kans., 7; and outside sales for Ft. Smith/Russellville, Ark., 6.

Also, during April, said Rusher, a majority of cards were filed with AAA for 78 SWB Wireless employees in Harlingen/McAllen, Tex. (Local 6229 and President Dennis Dobbs); 42 in Wichita, Kans. (Local 6402, President Rob Bailey and CWA Representative Jim Tucker); several in Topeka, Kans. (Local 6401, President Debbie Snow and CWA Representative Sandy Cox); 63 in Lubbock, Tex. (Local 6203, President Jack Maxey, Vice President Sharon Hughes and CWA Representa-tive Mike Littleton, and 33 in Tulsa, Okla. (Local 6012, organizer Sue V. Mills and President Dean Franklin).

Tucker, CWA Representative Bill Wildoner, several local presidents and Wireless members were set to begin bargaining May 19 for Wireless workers in Kansas City, Topeka, Wichita, Lawrence, and St. Joseph, with pay raises and the elimination of favoritism topping their list of demands.

Rusher said CWA now represents every Wireless unit in the Midwestern region, and that outreach continues: "The locals have done a great job on this since we've gotten cardcheck. Every local that has a Wireless unit in their area has been working on organizing."


Campus Workers 'ACE' Victory
The third full week of April, CWA Local 2101 in Baltimore obtained notice of certification from a neutral third party appointed by the Community Colleges of Baltimore County Board of Trustees for 304 classified positions on three campuses, with about 30 additional positions still in dispute.

District 2 Vice President Pete Catucci assigned CWA Representative Jann Buttiglieri and Organizing Coordinator Eduardo Diaz to work with Local 2101's organizing committee, co-chaired by Vice President Ron Collins and Patricia Davis, and the CCBC Association of Classified Employees. Their efforts went hand in hand with those of CWA's public worker department, including Vice President Brooks Sunkett; Chris Kennedy, assistant to the vice president; and Mark Blum, who heads the department's CWA Higher Education Project.

The campaign started with a core group of CCBC administrative and technical workers who founded ACE in 1996 and began to explore possibilities of joining an international union. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which already represented blue collar CCBC workers, came under consideration but, said Davis, CWA won out, partly because workers were impressed with the union's creative alternatives to striking when its Bell Atlantic contract expired in 1995.

Pam Wilt, John Bachelor and Gretchen Merrell, on three different campuses, Catonsville, Essex and Dundalk, coordinated mobilization activities by ACE/CWA. Activists met weekly at Local 2101's union hall and published a bi-monthly broadsheet newsletter to keep workers informed. Every issue of the paper pointed recipients to CWA's World Wide Web page with its special section linking them to the union's Higher Education Network of members on college campuses across the nation, as well as listing CWA resources for bargaining and media relations in their specialized area.

CCBC Rules and Regulations for Collective Bargaining for Classified Employees, adopted by its board of trustees in 1977, call for a representation election if 30 percent of a bargaining unit expresses interest, or recognition without an election if a union has signed up more than 50 percent.

When in late February the board tried to change its own rules midstream and refused to proceed with verification of a majority by a neutral third party, the ACE-CWA team got busy. ACE-CWA and Local 2101 members wrote to a host of public officials and conducted a media campaign.

At their behest, Baltimore County Delegate Michael Finifter and Baltimore City state Sen. George Della Jr. wrote state Sen. Francis Kelley, chairman of the board, urging swift recognition. Both the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Labor College of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies suspended plans for cooperative education ventures with the colleges. The Steelworkers, who conduct a training program on Dundalk campus, also lent support.

Throughout the campaign, Local 2101 made its union hall available for weekly mobilization meetings. Local 2101's Collins and other activists regularly accompanied ACE-CWA representatives to Annapolis to lobby legislators. Sunkett, Kennedy, Diaz, and Buttiglieri all visited meetings.

The public worker department also prepared an advertising campaign to step up the pressure if needed, but after a press conference that got ACE-CWA favorable coverage in the Baltimore Sun, the board of trustees agreed to appoint a neutral third party to verify the union's majority status.

Said Diaz, "This is the way an organizing campaign is supposed to work. Everybody at the national, the district and the local level were right there when they were supposed to be."


"What City, Please?"
After a longstanding contract with Bell South to provide its 555-1212 directory assistance service, AT&T took the work back in-house two years ago. AT&T claimed that the D.A. unit, slated for 550 positions, was a new business and therefore exempt from the cardcheck and neutrality agreement CWA negotiated in its last contract. CWA Local 3207 in Augusta set out nine months ago to sign up the current 361 operators.

Local President Judy Dennis attended both a District 3 organizing retreat and CWA's Communications and Technologies conference where, she said, she heard Bahr stress how various CWA units must work together to grow the union. She found "tremendous support" for her campaign from both C&T and District 3 Vice Presidents Jim Irvine and Jimmy Smith, who provided staff and resources.

District 3 CWA Representative Beverly Hicks, who worked closely with the campaign, said assistance from her Comm Tech colleagues Mary Jo Sherman and Ron Tyree was invaluable. But her highest praise was for Dennis.

"She and her people deserve all the credit," said Hicks. "They went out and contacted the people, got the company to let them in the building, they did everything."

Dennis singled out for appreciation Monique Jones and James Bethea, who led the internal organizing committee, and Kathy Filbey, Local 3207 administrative assistant for operator services at Bell South, who gave the AT&T operators a vision of how much better life could be with CWA representation.

Dennis met with management in December, and within 60 days, the local collected authorization cards from 50 percent plus one of the unit. Management turned down the unit's demand for cardcheck recognition but initially showed little hostility toward their election campaign.

"It seemed it was going to go fine," said Hicks. "Then once they realized we were going to get the vote, they ordered us off the property. It was a battle every day."

"When they counted the votes, the first 10 were 'no,'" said Hicks, who was on hand for the count with Smith. "Management was grinning ear to ear. Then the next hundred were 'yes.' There was not a doubt in anyone's mind, these people wanted representation."

Dennis said the local hoped to obtain a contract for the new unit as part of the current round of AT&T bargaining and was putting some issues on the table for them - better pay, benefits and hours are principal considerations - but that their first contract might have to be bargained seperately.


ORGANIZING ROUNDUP
Other CWA Victories:

• District 1. CWA Local 1040 won elections in two units of Caring Inc. in Absecon, N.J. and has several other election petitions pending. District 1 Organizing Coordinator Ed Sabol also reports Local 1126 in Utica, N.Y. won an election among dietary technicians.
  
  
• District 3. Local 3976 President Harold Stogsdill and CWA Representative Dennis Dearing quashed a second-attempt to decertify MSI-Huntsville, Ala., on a vote of 28-13. MSI is a government contractor at the NASA space center there. The District picked up a small government telecom contractor, Cordev, on a vote of 7-4 in a campaign led by Powell credited Terry Derouen, president of Lake Charles, La. Local 3407, and CWA Representative Booker Lester.
  
  
• District 4. Ameritech SecurityLink employees in Cleveland, Ohio voted 17-11 to join CWA following a three-year campaign by CWA Local 4340. It's the first organized office in this subsidiary, said local President Ed Phillips, who credited local Organizing Director Jim Cosgrove, Chief Steward Dave Hiatt and Steward Guy Phillips for spending countless hours on the campaign. Special credit goes to former chief steward Tom Ducca, who recently retired but continued to work on the campaign. CWA Local 4039 and President Kim Hoppe won an election for six technicians at the Community Access Center, Kalamazoo, Mich. The election was conducted by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. The vote was 4-0.
  
  
• District 9. Thirty-five operators who answer phones for the second largest funeral and cemetery services group in the nation voted 16-12 to join CWA. In the final days before the election, incoming calls dwindled to almost nothing and rumors circulated that the Loewen Group would close its operation and move elsewhere if the operators went union. Still the majority held, said District 9 Organizing Coordinator Virginia Rodriguez-Jones. It was a first organizing drive for CWA Local 9417 in Stockton, Calif., assisted by CWA Representative Charlie Strong.
  
  
• NABET-CWA. Televisa, a Mexican-owned television station in Washington, D.C. voted 3-2 for NABET-CWA.
  
  
• Newspaper Guild. TNG-CWA Local 43 in Toledo, Ohio, won an election at the Toledo Blade Credit Union, 4-0. Eric Geist, Guild director of field operations, credited Local 43 and member Larry Vellaquette, a Blade employee who has assisted in three other organizing drives.