Remarks By President Larry Cohen at the 73rd CWA Convention

It’s great to follow George Miller, not just a leader in Congress but a leader in our movement for economic justice. Elected leaders like George and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi give us hope that we can create a path to restore the American Dream for working women and men. Thank you, George.

Each day I am honored to be your President and to be able to work with our Executive Board; our staff; and to work with you, our local leaders, and with members in every sector of our union.

I want to acknowledge our United flight attendants—1,000 mobilizers who won the largest private sector representation election in the U.S. this year—25,000 United/Continental flight attendants have joined our union. And appreciation to all the staff and officers throughout our union who worked day and night on this for months, and the other staff who took up for their normal work. Stand up United flight attendants; you inspire us all.

Now we will support you as you battle management for a contract that says — it’s our turn — we sacrificed during bankruptcy but now higher profits mean higher wages— no more concessions, now it’s our turn.

We meet today at a critical and historic time for CWA, our movement, and our nations.

We are on the march as our CWA 2011 Highlights booklet shows. We have made progress across the union on all three sides of the CWA triangle: organizing, political action and bargaining.

We achieved success at the bargaining table. We’ve negotiated a new contract at GE -- ratified by 70 percent and at our largest health care sector unit Kaleida where we beat back massive concessions. More than 3,000 marched through the streets of Buffalo on the even of the contract termination demanding a settlement.

Many of our members today still are engaged in tough bargaining with some of the world’s largest corporations at NBC and ABC, at USAirways and Verizon and many other units across all sectors. Look through the Highlights – 51 different examples -- of the amazing things we are accomplishing in these tough times.

I stand here before you, proud of our work and applaud you as the best workplace leaders in the labor movement.

But times are tough. Our economic system is broken. Our challenge is to build a movement that restores the American Dream by making collective bargaining a part of the fabric of our nations.

CWA was part of the organizing surge when private sector bargaining coverage was rising for American and Canadian workers, as shown in the chart. Bargaining coverage grew from 8 percent in 1930 to almost 36 percent in the early 60s, and in those years, we negotiated real improvements in living standards.

Better health care, better pensions, higher wages and expanding organizing rights — and we expected that our children and grandchildren would have a better life.

But everything changed as bargaining rights declined. You can see its been declining now for 40 years in the US and our recent history teaches us that it is not really possible to steadily improve our standard of living when bargaining power is collapsing.

Real wages were rising until about 1973, but as you can see on this chart, they have stagnated and then declined. The decline in wages followed the decline in bargaining coverage.

As you can see, productivity continued to grow. But the gap between productivity and real wages began to widen. The value of what we as workers produce increases but because bargaining power has declined, our wages stagnate and fall further behind.

This productivity gap represents $500 per week in lost wages for 90 percent of Americans without collective bargaining. CEOs and Wall Street bankers have grabbed their share, and they want our share too. That’s why they’re so invested in both political parties, blocking our efforts to improve bargaining and organizing rights, better health care, quality jobs and retirement security.

As we reported in this issue of the CWA News, CEO pay is skyrocketing. In 1980, CEO pay was 42 times the average worker’s pay. Already too high. Today, it’s 343 times the average worker’s pay.

CEOs keep getting richer because they are writing the rules. It really does all come back to bargaining coverage.

A decline in bargaining coverage is not inevitable. Around the world, other labor movements are making forward progress. Look at the chart for other nations.

Canada – 2.5 times the U.S rate. Brazil and South Africa’s rates are even higher as they emerge from even harsher conditions in their past than we have today.

Bargaining rights are critical to any functioning democracy. And bargaining rights are critical for a functioning economy.

In the countries with tall bar graphs and high levels of collective bargaining —wages have kept up with productivity gains. Wages in Brazil in the growing union sectors are climbing by double digits. Korean wages in manufacturing and telecom now rival ours.

And that bargaining power is why the Chamber of Commerce and the right-wing elected officials will do anything to drive down bargaining coverage further. That explains their attacks in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, Florida and New Jersey.

The tie-in between high levels of collective bargaining, a rising standard of living, and a prosperous economy is no secret. February 1, 1938—John Maynard Keynes, the top economist in the world at the time, wrote from London to President Roosevelt—“I regard the expansion of collective bargaining as essential.”

Keynes was not a labor party guy—but he knew that the economy would not recover in the U.S. or Europe if wages did not keep up with productivity. The mortgage crisis in the U.S. began with stagnant wages. Workers could not afford real mortgages with rising housing prices, so Wall Street backed flim-flam mortgages that fell apart when the real estate bubble burst.

If we had extended bargaining rights and had a seat at the table, workers would have negotiated higher wages. As a result, they would have paid taxes and our budget deficit and social security system now would be on firmer ground…not to mention that many aspects of the financial crisis would have been averted.

Each of us needs to be able to tell this story of how collective bargaining is essential to our economy and the American Dream.

We need to build a political movement that stops scapegoating workers whether public or private sector, that supports bargaining and organizing rights, and that demands real progress on the four issues this Convention adopted in 2005.

Strategic Issues:

1. Secure Sustainable Jobs
2. Health Care for All
3. Retirement Security
4. Bargaining and Organizing Rights

We can’t move forward on any of our goals and to expand collective bargaining without a movement to restore democracy.

The current Senate rules were used by CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce to block the Employee Free Choice Act; to block health care reform where every employer would be mandated to pay and to block 433 other legislative items that were passed in the House. Not a single one of the 435 measures passed by the House, was ever considered on the floor of the Senate. This is not what democracy looks like.

And when the Supreme Court, packed with Bush appointees, ruled in Citizens United in 2010 that there are no limits on campaign contributions, and no disclosure of where the money comes from, that is not what democracy looks like.

And so we’ve added a fifth strategic issue: restoring democracy.

At our January meeting, the Executive Board adopted a strategy that we called: “Five Steps for Union Survival and UnionBuilding.”

Five Steps for Union Survival and UnionBuilding:

1. Continually redirect our resources and structure to support our goals in line with current income.
2. Implement industry and employer-based strategies that rely on local leadership and Strategic Industry Funds.
3. Our 2011 organizing priorities include our T-Mobile organizing drive, now selected as the global campaign for labor; our campaign for United flight attendants and other current organizing that has a potential of 50,000 members.
4. Continue our Political and Legislative strategies at the federal and state levels that focus on our four key issues and rebuilding democracy by changing Senate rules and obtaining campaign finance reform.
5. Build Alliances on economic issues at local, state and national levels.

Much of our focus this week will be on point 1, continually redirect our resources for front-line fights. We must use our resources based on our present needs, not the past. We must recognize that attacks on labor are deliberate—aimed at reducing union jobs, membership and political clout.

We will debate eliminating the Executive Vice President position, based on these priorities.

We will discuss distributing some of the Strategic Industry Funds to locals and the international union to support our bargaining and organizing fights over the next two years, while keeping the overwhelming majority of SIF funds for the large, long-term campaigns that face us, and exploring other long-term solutions.

The labor movement has lost 10 percent of its membership in the last two years and CWA is no exception. We are rising to the financial challenge and I especially want to acknowledge the commitment of CWA staff including all sectors during this difficult time. All have skipped pay increases, eliminated the cola on pensions, and made other sacrifices as our employers cut CWA members’ jobs, more than offsetting organizing increases. Local officers have made similar commitments and hard choices. We all understand that we put the fight first, the members first, CWA first, while taking care of each other to the very best of our ability.

We have talked a lot here over the years about Step 2: Industry strategies, our use of Strategic Industry Funds for campaigns like Speed Matters and Lean Manufacturing, Quality Journalism and Spanish Language Broadcasting, and health care workers’ campaigns to keep hospitals open.

I want to emphasize that industry and employer strategies now mean putting every CWA employer on notice—there cannot be economic recovery without a recovery for workers and their families. We will fight at every opportunity for our fair share of what we produce. The recession is over for management but not workers. And when our contracts expire, we will fight concessions. We will use every tactic available and invent new ones.

For example, as we approach the early August expiration at Verizon, Verizon management needs to know that we have fought concessions many times before when profits were rising—with long strikes and long periods of mobilizing on the job.

Our bargaining strategy is sound. Fifty-five thousand CWA and IBEW workers are united. Our leadership is solid with our committee of eight unifying our three districts and IBEW. All face a common August 6^th expiration date—and our mobilization activity will escalate beginning with a rally here tomorrow night and will last as long as it takes—one day longer than management greed. This union is ready to mobilize in the heat of August if these concession demands aren’t off the table.

New Jersey Governor Christie thinks he will continue to strip our members of their rights and standard of living as he did on health care, despite months of demonstrations and tens of thousands mobilized. Now our contracts have expired for 40,000 state worker CWA members and 20,000 of our members in local government face unilateral cuts to their health care averaging $4,000 in premium increases per year after a phase-in.

But clearly those members understand the link between bargaining, political action, and movement building. And we will carry on the fight united as never before.

Tomorrow afternoon, we will focus on item 3: organizing. Joining us will be true working class heroes from United-Continental, T-Mobile and Piedmont.

Both political action and movement building -- items four and five on the list – require fundamental change.

We should declare that the political path we have traveled from our Unions founding ended in 2008. We need to be honest with ourselves and our members. At the Federal level, we cannot do better than we did in 2008 when we elected President Obama and Congressional majorities in the House and Senate in an atmosphere of great hope and expectations.

While those results were much better than the alternative, they do not approach the changes we need to improve our standard of living or to reverse the decline in bargaining rights.

The President makes a difference. He appointed members to the National Labor Relations Board (Pearce & Becker to join Liebman) and to the National Mediation Board (Puchala). All of whom respect collective bargaining.

But doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

We have to change what we do.

We have to rethink our political work. Yes we need to raise political action funds, but that alone does not provide a path to the political movement we need.

Our Legislative Political Action Team or LPAT strategy is the best grassroots strategy in our movement. We are building in 25 states and have 1,000 activists.

Additionally, we’ve innovated with national activist conference calls where active members across our union hear front-line reports from their brothers and sisters of their movement building activites and battle for economic justice.

But we must do more. We need to keep building our movement. We need to be in the streets as well as at the ballot box.

Our political program now looks more like this:

CWA's Political Program

1. Legislative
2. Electoral
3. Organizing
4. MovementBuilding

We need the energy and intensity of Madison, Wisconsin or Cairo, Egypt. We need to unite with non-labor groups who share our vision of restoring the American Dream for working families.

To build this movement, we need to go both broader and deeper. Broader, organizing more working women and men to our side—directly through unions but just as importantly, through partner groups—faith based, environmental like Sierra Club, civil rights like NAACP, democracy like Common Cause, students and young workers -- as we will hear in the Next Generation Committee report, and our own retirees.

The political issue of the summer will be the Republican proposal to cut Medicare. Our ability to raise this issue at August town halls will test our ability to change our political climate.

Let’s watch a short video of CWA in action with our partners. This is movement building. This is what democracy looks like!

Not only must we go broader, but this is also a time when we need to deepen our commitment. Movement building is about our own values as well as our strategies, actions and results.

I am honored to be here with Elaine Huff (she stands). Elaine has been a steward and member for 65 years. Elaine went to work for Southern Bell just out of high school in May, 1946, as a long distance switchboard operator and in the next 36 years worked in repair, frame attendant, and finally a plug- in coordinator. She walked her first picket line in 1947, met her husband on the picket line in 1950, and was in the long strike of 1955.

Today, she is president of RMC-CWA Local 3802 and for 65 years has always been willing to do anything she could for CWA!

Or listen to the words of 23-year old Christine Horgan, her father run over and killed by a scab on the 1989 Nynex picket line. Gerry Horgan was a shop steward and wonderful leader of Local 1103.

Recently at a Local 1103 event Christine said:

I believe that if my father Edward Gerry Horgan had known what he would sacrifice for the rights and betterment of his friends and co-workers, he would still have shown up to the picket line that day, with a smile and a joke. ...he knew how strong that bond between him and all the members of his union was.

...My sister and I grew older but we never forgot the support of our loving CWA family. To my family, CWA was more than just a collective bargaining unit. It was more than just trying to get the best deal possible. To my family, CWA was my family.

We can’t go much deeper than that but we can each approach the service of Elaine and the values of Christine.

Movement building means capturing the emotions of our nations as we fight back, realizing what is at stake and how hard the path is in front of us.

We will need new tactics and approaches as we saw in the video. Governors like Walker and Kasich and Daniels and Christie make up new rules to crush us.

We need the spirit of the young University of Wisconsin students and workers who seized the Capitol building for weeks.

We need the spirit of Tunisians who changed their government peacefully or Egyptians who stood in Tahrir Square using texts and tweets to communicate and went sleepless for days and now, millions of Egyptian workers are building new unions.

Or Italians, winning a recent referendum vote against their right-wing government and stopping privatization and the spread of nuclear energy with tactics like:

Banner drops, mass bike rides, workshops, information booths, film screenings, social networking, people running nude through the streets (maybe that works better in Italy), and door to door, neighbor to neighbor, person to person grassroots actions.

Being a mostly Catholic country, the word miracle sprang from people’s lips and when the votes were counted, 57 percent had voted against privatization and nuclear energy and sent a clear signal that the people could mobilize and win.

This is what we see in Wisconsin now in recall elections of Senators who voted to strip public sector bargaining.

Or in Ohio, where we filed 1.3 million signatures on petitions to repeal Senate

Bill 5 which would strip bargaining rights from public workers.

In the days ahead, as we debate internal change, the reallocation of resources, and our program for movement building, let’s be sure to keep inspiring and encouraging each other. Together we can build this movement. We must recognize we are building the foundation for renewal of our movement for ourselves, our children and generations to come.

Together we are CWA.

Only together do we have a chance to march and fight for the future and reverse the tide of hatred and repression that is all around us. Together we make a difference.

Together we are CWA!