Feb 1, 1998

As we enter a big collective bargaining year for CWA in telecommunications, it is an industry rumbling toward a seismic realignment in 1998 and over the short term of our next contracts.

Between now and the year 2000, we can predict greater and faster changes than in any three-year period since the Bell System breakup 15 years ago that began this age of telecom upheaval. In this year’s bargaining round, we realize that we will be setting the terms that determine CWA members’ access to future jobs, the standards of those jobs and our union’s power to deal with the industry titans.

America will finally see the corporate combinations that put the pieces together for the information future — local and long distance, wireless and wireline, phone and cable and satellite, and uses of the Internet that can’t be imagined today.

There are only five Bell regional companies now, down from seven, and certainly there will be fewer in a couple of years because of mergers. And likely, long distance won’t be dominated by today’s Big Three, AT&T, MCI and Sprint, as we know them.

The mega-deals we have seen, and are yet to see, profoundly affect CWA members and the rest of the public, showing why we must be active in the political/public policy arena.

We are vigorously opposing the proposed MCI/WorldCom merger, for example, as an anti-competitive grab for monopoly power that also would join together two of the biggest non-union communications giants and undermine labor standards throughout the industry (see page 4).

MCI/WorldCom overnight would control 63 percent of the Internet backbone, with the power to control access and set rates paid by the thousands of Internet providers. This one company would dominate what many consider the core information infrastructure of the 21st century.

At the same time, the MCI/WorldCom business plan reverses MCI’s earlier focus on competing with the local companies for residential phone service, instead exclusively targeting the high-profit large and medium-sized business market for local loop bypass and connection to its long distance and Internet data networks.

AT&T’s response was to make an $11 billion bid for Teleport, injecting AT&T into local competition, likewise with an emphasis on more profitable business bypass while it defers for the moment any major investment in local residential competition.

Right now there is a he said/she said policy argument between the local and long distance companies that has stymied the development of bundled communications services — and universal access to them — that Congress envisioned in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Simply: The long distance companies say the Bells and GTE are charging too much to buy local loop access, and that’s why they haven’t moved significantly to compete for residential business. The local companies say the Big Three have no interest in competing with them except for lucrative business customers, thus keeping in place a barrier to the Bells’ entry into long distance.

The Telecom Act said the Bells have to welcome competition for residential service before they can offer long distance, and it set up a 14-point competitive checklist which the local carriers say is unrealistic. SBC Corp. challenged the restriction head on in a successful lawsuit (which CWA joined), although that ruling has been stayed temporarily while policy makers sort everything out.

What’s clear is that tremendous forces are in play that will reshape the industry and before long put the major players — whoever they turn out to be in a couple of years — into every aspect of telecommunications, information and entertainment.

That makes it imperative for CWA in this bargaining round to win wall-to-wall organizing rights at all these companies, as we have at SBC/ PacTel. Here, the company will recognize the union at any future new business when a majority of workers sign up to join CWA (“card check recognition”). It means expanded voluntary transfer rights and access by members to the new jobs, jobs with union standards. And it ensures that CWA will have an effective presence at this company — and collective bargaining power — in the years ahead.

At AT&T, we already see one major growth area, wireless, out of bounds to us right now. If its merger with Teleport takes place, it would bring work that right now goes to non-union contractors into this ostensibly union company — but we have to break through with card-check organizing rights to make these union jobs. There are similar examples at each of our employers.

There is no greater priority for us than making sure that the telecommunications industry remains a union industry and a source of good paying jobs that set the standard for the Amer-ican workplace of the next century.